doctor(logic)

The Logician Who Wouldn't Check His Work

2010-10-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

In mathematics, it is common to start from some foundational assumptions, and see what you can prove. The assumptions are called axioms, and the notable generalities you can prove are called theorems.

The classic example is the Pythagorean Theorem. You learned this theorem in high school because it's extremely useful in everyday life. You may even have proved it in class. If you start from the axioms of (Euclidean) geometry, you can prove that the square of the length of the long side of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.

Yes, for a lot of people, mathematical proofs put them right to sleep. However, I think they understand the point of the exercise. There are important truths that you can't easily work out in your head. It's important to check the steps, even if you're not the one doing it.

There are some ideas in mathematics we think might be true, but which we have yet to be able to prove. One of the most famous is the Goldbach Conjecture:

Every even integer greater than 2 is a Goldbach number, a number that can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

Boffins have been trying to crack this nut since Goldbach came up with it in 1742. No one has yet succeeded, though several complex proofs have been proposed.

Imagine a mathematician, well call him Oiler, who claims that the Goldbach Conjecture is true. Oiler claims he has thought his way through the proof in his head, and he's confident the Conjecture is true.

Naturally, we are thrilled, and we ask Oiler to write down a detailed proof to support his conclusion. Oiler refuses. Oiler tells us that the Goldbach Theorem is special. It's a special class of theorem that's true, but which you can only see to be true if you DO NOT write down the proof and check your work carefully. After we pick our jaws up off the floor, we would quiz Mr. Oiler about his claim just to make sure we understand him correctly.

We would then proceed to cover Oiler in tar, and feather him. We would ridicule Oiler savagely.

Yes, this is an analogy for superstitious thinking. What is superstitious thinking?

Superstitious thinking is counting the hits but not the misses. It's about looking for ways to confirm your theories, but never looking for ways to prove them wrong. It's a matter of ignoring the possibility that an effect would exist even if the theory was false. It's a matter of succumbing to human cognitive biases.

Superstitious thinking can be overcome by using statistics, random sampling, blind testing, and an array of other techniques for checking our work. Basically, it's a matter of using science to suppress human bias and get to the truth.

There are a lot of people in the world who believe in the paranormal, and when you ask them to prove their case, their favorite answer is that God (or the aliens, or the fairies, or whatever) won't be tested. They tell us you can only see them when you don't use science to check your work. Now, how is this any different from Mr. Oiler in the above?

I'm not seeing a significant difference.

Qualia and Reductionism

2010-09-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of observations.

First, it seems impossible to imagine that the quale for red and the quale for green could ever be the same as long as we can distinguish red and green. So, we can never intuitively reduce red to green, or, indeed, reduce one quale to another. (This suggests to me that we should identify a quale for X with "a capacity to recognize X". However, I don't need to adhere to such a controversial statement.)

My second observation is that when things are said to "reduce" in the sciences, that reduction never reduces one quale to another. I'll describe what I mean with a specific example.

NOTE: As a preface to my example about reduction, let no one persist in the faulty belief that reductionism is eliminative. Reduction of water to H2O does not eliminate water, nor does it eliminate oceans, droplets or any other watery things. Reduction identifies, but does not eliminate. Reduction identifies a droplet of water with a configuration of H2O molecules. At the end of the reduction process, droplets of water still exist.

Suppose we reduce a droplet of water to the presence and motions of H2O molecules. What does this mean in terms of qualia?

Well, the reduction relies on experiments. Things like electrolysis which breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen gases, spectroscopic experiments the can identify the gases by the light they absorb, and the way hydrogen burning in oxygen creates water vapor.

However, at no time can we say that the qualia we experience while performing the experiments are equivalent to the experience of, say, dipping our hands in a pond. If they were equivalent, then we would be unable to distinguish the experience of performing the experiments (and perhaps the experience of making the relevant inferences) from the experience of dipping our hands into a pond. That would be absurd.

Yet I doubt that any of us is uncertain that water reduces to H2O. We don't think that water is anything more than H2O. We don't argue that there is some non-physical stuff which bridges the gap between the qualia of our experiments and the qualia of water itself.

The conclusion is that reduction does not equate qualia. Reduction is about ontology.

What is ontology? Ontology looks at all of our experiences and asks what is the minimum number of substances and relationships that explain those experiences. When we see an apple, we don't assume that every property of every apple, and every possible conjunction of properties, at every moment in time is ontologically basic. There is something it is like to gaze at the same apple for 10 minutes, and there is something it is like to glance at the apple, and these two qualia are distinct. But we don't think that gazed-at apples are ontologically different from glanced-at apples. We think there is just one apple, whether we gaze at it, glance at it, look at its silhouette, or take a bite of it.

Ontology seeks to reduce the vast multitude of our experiences down to the fewest number of causes. In this case, a single apple, seen from different perspectives.

So, let's return to qualia in the mind-body problem. The goal of the Knowledge Argument, for example, is to show that the quale for red does not reduce to a scientific, ontological model. This seems to me to be a doomed project. Reduction never equates one quale with another. The fact that reduction doesn't do this (ever) is not a mark against reductionism. I now think that these sorts of arguments confuse epistemological basics with ontology.

Qualia are the most basic of epistemological inputs, and these inputs are unique. Ontologies are epistemological outputs. Epistemological outputs are never equivalent to basic epistemological inputs (because epistemological outputs are distinguishable from the things they model). Ontologies can, at best, explain or predict relationships between epistemological inputs.

Where does this lead us?

There's an implicit assumption in dualist arguments that, if minds were physical, they ought to be able to do what we cannot. This is an implicit assumption because, if we believed that physical machines could not reduce one quale into another (i.e., that they would be in the same position that we are in), then we could not conclude that we are non-physical from the position we are in! Every mind would be in that position, whether physical or not!

So, would physical minds be in the same position?

Assume that a physical mind can exist and be conscious. This mind is going to have some raw experiences, some raw recognitions, some distinguishable inputs. When this mind works out an ontological model of its world, the best it will be able to do is to correlate the epistemological basics of its experience (its inputs), and build a model. That model may predict its inputs perfectly, but the model is not the same thing as the input it is predicting. If it were the same thing as the input it were predicting, then the model would be indistinguishable from what it was modeling.

I conclude that a physical mind will find itself in exactly the position in which we humans find ourselves. The only way the machine won't be that way is if it is incapable of distinguishing simulations of its model from the real thing. Again, this seems absurd.

Having shown that physical minds will be in the same position in which we find ourselves, I can argue that we can't infer ontological dualism from the position in which we find ourselves. The inability to reduce one quale into another is not a feature of dualist minds but of all minds, including purely physical ones.

The "Free" in Free Will

2010-09-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, I was having a chat with some of my atheist/agnostic friends about free will. While we seem to agree on the way things actually are, there was some disagreement as to whether we have free will. After some discussion, I think I discovered that for most of my friends, free means "not deterministic" or "not deterministic and not random". And, since my friends think the universe is pretty much deterministic, they don't believe free will exists.

If this was just a dispute about terminology, there wouldn't be much more to say. However, I could tell that for one or two of my colleagues, this lack of free will was the source of some angst. Why should that be? Why should anyone care about a rather mathematical abstraction like determinism?

This got me thinking more about value. Daniel Dennett says that determinism gives us all the free will that's worth having. So, what is it that we value?

In my opinion, what people value is the product of the work they do when making decisions. They want to have made good decisions for good reasons. What I intend to argue here is that throwing non-deterministic factors into decision-making will not increase what we value about our decision-making.

The short version of the argument is simply this: a good reasoner is determined to get to a good conclusion from initial premises.

Consider the classic Socrates syllogism:

Premise 1: All men are mortal.
Premise 2: Socrates is a man.
____
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

If we assume the premises, then the conclusion follows. Any person who assumes the premises, but determines that Socrates is not mortal is a bad reasoner. Injecting non-deterministic factors into the reasoning process will only make a good reasoner worse!

What's more, this syllogism is constant and time-independent. It's as true today as it was a billion years ago, or as it will be billion years in the future. The validity of the syllogism is a timeless fact. The thing that is time-dependent, the thing that happens in time, is the way our mind parses and traverses this timeless logical fact. And here, non-determinism in the conclusion one reaches will only make a good reasoner worse.

To be a bit more precise, getting to a non-deterministic conclusion would only make things better if we were really bad at reasoning. If our reasoning ability was worse than random guessing (e.g., if we pathologically got to wrong conclusions), then a non-deterministic element might improve our score, but I don't think we would value random guessing a whole lot more than we would value being absolutely awful at reasoning. Guessing just isn't the kind of reasoning we value.

The other reason why we might devalue deterministic reasoning is that the kind of deterministic reasoning that's on the table is physical determinism. If reasoning is the result of chemical interactions, then people worry that they didn't act for good reasons, but just because some electrons and nuclei buzzed around in their heads and created a new configuration. They worry that physical reasons are mutually exclusive of conceptual reasons.

This worry is the source of an anti-naturalistic argument called the Argument from Reason. The basic idea is that, if matter is not fundamentally mental at its lowest level, then thoughts are the results of non-mental physics (like chemistry). And if thoughts are non-mental underneath, then thoughts aren't really about things, and decisions are not for the reasons we think they are. And if reasons aren't reasons, then the reasons we gave for concluding that the world is based on non-mental physics are worthless, and naturalism is self-refuting.

I think the Argument from Reason is simultaneously under-appreciated and wrong. It's difficult to fault most naturalists when they follow scientific inferences and conclude that the mind is a biochemical mechanism, but I also think that it's important for naturalists to understand why the Argument from Reason is wrong.

The Argument from Reason assumes that things that occur for physical or chemical reasons cannot also occur for reasons in the world of ideas. This assumption seems reasonable at first. If we know that X is necessary and sufficient cause for Y, then we generally discount other, independent causes. In this case, if physics is a necessary and sufficient cause for what we think and do, then reasons from the world of ideas should be discounted as reasons for our thinking.

Greedy Reductionism
The problem with the assumption underneath the Argument from Reason is that it relies on something called greedy reductionism. Greedy reductionism is another expression we owe to Daniel Dennett. Reductionism is something that comes from the physical sciences. Historically, we have found that wide variety of objects and phenomena are actually the result of just a few kinds of objects and a few kinds of phenomena. For example, the periodic table of elements contains over a hundred chemical elements, and the number of chemical interaction phenomena is vast. However, we have discovered that chemistry is just the result of protons, neutrons and electrons interacting electromagnetically. The vast science of chemistry reduces to the physics of a few kinds of things that interact in one simple way. The complexity arises from the vast number of configurations that can arise from some simple physics. Carbon has unique chemical properties, but carbon is actually the result of electromagnetism plus protons, neutrons and electrons.

The greedy reductionist is the philosopher who takes this information and claims that chemical elements don't exist anymore. This is not an idea from the sciences. It is a confusion.

Reductionism identifies the thing being reduced with a configuration of something more fundamental. Reductionism doesn't replace the thing being reduced, but merely explains it. Our description of an interaction might be replaced by reductionism (e.g., a chemical reaction might better be described as an electromagnetic interaction between electrons), but the original thing is never eliminated by reductionism.

Minds have thoughts, and make decisions for reasons. If minds, thoughts and reasons reduce to physical mechanisms, then we eliminate neither minds, thoughts nor reasons. Those who champion physicalism are not saying that minds, thoughts and reasons do not exist. They are saying that minds, thoughts and reasons are physics. They are physical processes, states or configurations. Physics is not an alternative to thoughts and reasons as an explanation for thinking, but one and the same. Thinking is a physical process in humans.

This means that the physics of minds is not an explanation for thoughts that is independent of the conceptual reasons. And since physical mechanisms are not independent explanations, physical mechanisms are not mutually exclusive of conceptual mechanisms.

Explaining precisely how I thinking is a physical process is beyond the scope of this post, and, besides, I don't think such and explanation is necessary to refute the Argument from Reason. The Argument from Reason is really a gaps argument which says "I don't see how thinking can be a physical process, therefore it cannot be a physical process."

Summary
In summary, while the meaning of the word free is a matter of convention, I think that defining the word free to mean non-deterministic is confusing and counterproductive. What we care about is whether we have the kind of will that is valuable, and non-determinism doesn't help us get what we value.

An Argument Against Libertarian Free Will

2009-10-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

Suppose I am deciding whether or not to buy ice cream. Suppose also that all things being equal, a past-omniscient agent would predict a 50/50 chance of my buying ice cream. How does my final decision get made? Is there a reason for it?

Before I go any further, I want to note that I'm not talking about probabilities that result from a lack of knowledge on our part. If I flip a coin, I typically estimate the odds of tails at 50%, but that's really due to my ignorance about the behavior of a coin when I flip it. However, an observer who is omniscient about the past will be able to predict the outcome of my coin flip by computing what the laws of physics have to say about forces on the coin. In other words, when I speak of probabilities below, I'm talking about probabilities as they appear to an observer who is omniscient about the past.

According to libertarians, I somehow choose to buy or not buy the ice cream without my decision being (1) fully determined by the past, (2) random, or (3) some combination of determined and random.

Let's suppose that the world is not fully deterministic. How can the outcome of an event be partially determined?

Well, in quantum mechanics, as an example, the probability distribution for the event outcomes is determined, but the actual outcome is the result of a random selection according to the distribution.

For example, suppose a quantum theory predicts a 67% chance of an experiment finding an electron spin-up versus a 33% chance of finding the electron spin down. The theory says that nature acts as if the experiment is equivalent to placing 67 red balls and 33 green balls in a barrel, and randomly drawing a ball from the barrel. If the ball comes up red, then the electron is spin up, otherwise it is spin down. The past-omniscient observer only knows how many of each type of ball there are in the barrel.

This way of looking at events is quite general. It's not general because the world is physical, material or made up of quantum elements. It's general in the theoretical sense. If the past is determining something, then the past is altering the probability that an outcome will occur. A fully deterministic world is one in which the probabilities of outcomes are either 0% or 100%.

When pushed, even libertarians will agree that the past makes certain outcomes more probable than others. Will I choose to step in front of a moving bus this afternoon? Being a happy, stable person who lives a charmed life, probably not. Indeed, very probably not. Even if the libertarian believes I have the "free choice" to step in front of a moving bus, they can still admit that that choice is highly improbably due to factors in my past.

However, when we factor out the probability, what is left for a decision to be based upon?

It's very frustrating trying to pin down incompatibilists on this issue. As far as I can tell, the incompatibilist's belief in libertarian free will is generated by moral considerations, and comes without any technical accounting. For most libertarians, there is not only no mechanism for free will, but there's no way of distinguishing free will from randomness.

To make my argument more airtight, I'm going to suppose there's a detailed accounting for deterministic factors. What we'll see is that there's no basis for an agent to make a choice except via fundamental randomness.

Suppose I enumerate all the reasons I have to buy ice cream, and all the reasons not to buy ice cream. Suppose there turn out to be 5 reasons to buy (B1, B2, ..., B5), and 5 reasons not to buy (N1, N2, ..., N5).

For example, perhaps

N2 = "Ice cream will make me fat, and I want to be slim."

and

B4 = "Ice cream is one of the great pleasures of life, and I don't want to miss out on life's pleasures."

Each reason has an associated importance or weight. Being vain, I assign 10 points to N2, and 5 points to B4.

Since my vanity is is a part of my character, and my character is part of the past state of things, it is predictable. That is, the weight assigned to each reason is mostly determined by the past.

Suppose that these reasons and their weights translate into a 50/50 chance that I will buy the ice cream. That is, we are assuming that, all things being equal, the weight I assign to the reasons is such that they happen to cancel each other out.

At this stage of the thought experiment, the libertarian would say that I choose to buy or not to buy using my free will. What does this mean?

Well, something has to change the weighting of the reasons. It must be that, as I make my decision, I reassign weights to my reasons, and this causes me to come down on one side of the decision or the other.

But on what basis can I reassign weights to my reasons?

Presumably, the libertarian does not mean I am whimsical in reassigning the weights. Whimsy is random. There's no reason for it. It is arbitrary. To see this, imagine that my brain incorporates a random number generator which randomly shifts the weights of all the reasons. If the random number generator happens to throw the balance to buying the ice cream, I can't rationalize the decision by saying that my decision occurred because of B1-B5.

Could I have an actual reason to change my weights?

No. If I did have a reason to change weights such that I buy the ice cream, this reason would constitute B6, and should have been accounted for in my set. That is, the existence of such a reason contradicts the premise that I already had a complete set of reasons in sets B and N.

Is it possible that I discovered a new reason at the moment of my decision?

No. Nothing in the analysis above is phrased in terms of my own perspective. Rather, it's phrased in the perspective of a past-omniscient observer. It doesn't matter whether I was aware of B5. If I was unaware of it, the past-omniscient agent would have assigned it a low weight.

Is my attention to a particular reason the missing factor?

Well, attention or memory or prominence to consciousness may be a factor, but it doesn't help. Either there is a reason for the reason to have prominence to my consciousness or not. If there is a reason, it is already accounted for. If there isn't a reason, it is random.

At this stage, we are forced to conclude that whatever is not determined to the past-omniscient observer is fundamentally random. That is, there can be no possible reason or cause for the selection from the determined probabilities.

I would not be surprised to see some libertarians try to escape this conclusion by trying to redefine the word random. However, there's really nothing special to my definition. Just because an event occurs in the mind of an agent doesn't make any difference to my definition. There remains no reason for the decision, whether you call it random or not. Any attempt to make such a distinction is like saying that when a random event occurs in the mind of an agent, it's called whimsy. What value such nomenclature might have is beyond me.

Shagging Disproves Design

2009-10-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

Design is like painting. A painter has a palette of different colors to choose from, and a final painting is typically a combination of different paints from the palette.

Of course, a painter could use just one color. But if the canvas was large and the products diverse, it's pretty unlikely that a painter would use one color exclusively.

It's even more unlikely that the painter would use one specific color, like burnt sienna. However, if we knew of a painter who had no choice but to use burnt sienna, then a painting in burnt sienna would be far more likely to be by this restricted artist than by any other painter.

The above is an analogy to the argument I have given for why evolution disproves design. Neo-Darwinian evolution places a lot of constraints on the way things have to be. There has to be descent (breeding) and common descent (any two individuals have a common ancestor). Experiment tells us that common descent is true. In other words, something like neo-Darwinian evolution has been used consistently throughout the history of life on this planet.

Evolution is just one method of design. In general, a designer doesn't need to try every possible design. A designer can simulate and use complex rules to create a single design, then just implement that design by manufacturing, with no need for breeding. In general, a designer can also create designs that have little in common with past designs, and which are constructed from completely new materials.

Since the number of ways of designing things without evolution is far greater than the number of ways of designing things with evolution, the fact we see evolution and only evolution means that a designer is ruled out.

This is my standard probability argument against design.

One response I get back from intelligent design sympathizers is that evolution is a design technique that even we humans use. Clearly, anyone who responds this way is missing the point entirely. I say from the very beginning that evolution is a form of design. The point is that it is just one form of design, and there's no reason to use just one technique exclusively. If there was a reason for exclusive use of evolution, and if there were any rational reason to grant that scenario a privileged share of the probability, then there would be predictions stemming from that reason.

However, it occurred to me that there's yet another good reason to dismiss the ID rebuttal. Suppose I'm designing an airliner. I don't want my airliners to breed for survival. Airliners are supposed to be useful to me, not to themselves. However, suppose I want to use evolutionary methods to design the wing of the airliner. That's aplausible scenario. So I create simulations of wings, test them in virtual environments, and preferentially carry forward effective designs in the simulation, and cull ineffective designs from the population. This is a straightforward application of genetic algorithms to the problem of wing design.

However, at no time in my simulation to I create a detailed mechanism for the wings to breed or have sex. There is, of course, a mechanism for simulating the outcome of "breeding" wings, i.e., of passing on design elements or altering population sizes. However, none of the wings have genitals, and they don't shag.

So, even if a designer chose to develop life on this planet using evolutionary techniques, there's no need for breeding. Thus, the fact that we have genitals is yet another reason why we're not designed. If we were designed (or if we're the evolutionary simulation), we wouldn't need genitals.

Living in a Box

2009-09-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

Imagine a crystal cube. Suppose this crystal is purely a static 3D entity in a 3D universe. There is no time dimension.

Like all crystals, it is a lattice of points connected by bonds (line segments) to nearest neighbors. But let's suppose, also, that these bonds are directional. The bonds aren't merely line segments, but are arrows that always point away from a particular corner of the cube. We'll call this special corner, the "origin". The opposite corner of the cube we'll call "the terminus".

If we were somehow living in this cube, we would notice that EVERY point in the lattice "attracts" arrows (bonds) from the origin side, and "radiates" arrows out towards the terminus side. Invariably.

Naturally, we would conclude that it is an absolute law of the crystal in which we live that there are always arrows going in to a point, and always arrows going out of it.

However, would we also conclude that, if the crystal is finite, there MUST be arrows entering the origin corner point of the crystal?

Would we also conclude that, in a finite crystal, at the opposite corner of the cube, there MUST be arrows exiting the terminus point?

We obviously would not.

I hope you can see the analogy. The cube is like our universe. Every point in the crystal is an event or interaction. The arrows flowing into the points are causes from the past. The arrows flowing out from a point are effects radiating into the future. The law of cause and effect is the observed law that events have causes and effects.

You should be able to see that the concept of causation is only defined INSIDE of our universe. It applies only to points within it. It has no leverage at the origin corner or the terminus corner of the cube/universe.

The Problem With Detroit

2008-11-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

The U.S. auto mobile industry in an a shambles. Why?

Well, there are several contributing factors, such as higher labor costs, but there is one big reason. U.S. automakers don't make fuel-efficient vehicles that can compete.

Chronically, the automakers have planned on a short time horizon. They didn't invest over the long term, and they're unwilling to change the status quo. Ford, GM and Chrysler have too many inefficient trucks and SUV's, and their manufacturing processes take too long to retool. That's why cars like the Pontiac Grand Prix don't change body styles for 5 years or more, whle Toyota Camry gets a facelift every year or two.

Though the automakers developed hybrids, electric and fuel cell vehicles, they did so primarily as a PR move, with no intention of shipping green machines to the public unless they were absolutely forced to do so. Toyota forced their hand, and now American cars are playing a sad game of catch-up.

This myopic strategy has been ongoing for the last decade. Everyone knew the U.S. car industry was doing it.

What could have changed this? CAFE! Increasing average fleet fuel efficiency standards. The government could have forced the U.S. auto industry to build more fuel-efficent vehicles.

This would not only have made our carmakers greener, it would have made them more competitive over the long term.

Why didn't it happen? Because the Republicans insisted that it was better to let business play their game instead of having government get involved. Oh, and political contributions from the automakers might have had something to do with it, also.

It's really very simple. When you look at an industry, there are limitations in how the marketplace works. Most U.S. corporations don't have a long-term strategy. They're obsessed with short term profits and stock prices. Meanwhile, other governments write articles of legislation that force their industries to plan for the future. Consequently, their corporations are safer, greener, and more citizen friendly, and more competitive.

I'm all for free trade, but if we're going to take down trade barriers, why should the U.S. compete with one hand behind its back?

What government can do for biomedical research

2008-11-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

Sharon Begley in Newsweek:

These barriers to "translational" research (studies that move basic discoveries from bench to bedside) have become so daunting that scientists have a phrase for the chasm between a basic scientific discovery and a new treatment. "It's called the valley of death," says Greg Simon, president of FasterCures, a center set up by the (Michael) Milken Institute in 2003 to achieve what its name says. The valley of death is why many promising discoveries—genes linked to cancer and Parkinson's disease; biochemical pathways that ravage neurons in Lou Gehrig's disease—never move forward.

The next administration and Congress have a chance to change that, radically revamping the nation's biomedical research system by creating what proponents Richard Boxer, a urologist at the University of Miami, and Lou Weisbach, a Chicago entrepreneur, call a "center for cures" at NIH. The center would house multidisciplinary teams of biologists, chemists, technicians and others who would take a discovery such as Keirstead's and nurture it along to the point where a company is willing to put up the hundreds of millions of dollars to test it in patients. The existence of such a center would free scientists to go back to making important discoveries, not figuring out large-scale pipetting, for goodness' sake.

Skeptics Protest Bloggs Conviction

2008-11-02T14:12:00.000-08:00

Fred Bloggs was convicted of the murder in court, yesterday. His fingerprints were found at the scene. The victim's blood and DNA were found on Bloggs's coat at his home. Also, the murder weapon was found in Bloggs's garage. Eyewitness accounts placed Bloggs at the murder scene on the day in question.

However, skeptics protested against the verdict. Protesters argued that Bloggs was a victim of as-yet-unexplained coincidences. They argued that the victim died of natural (although bizarrely bloody) causes.

Skeptics cited what they called missing evidence in the case. They argued that prosecutors failed to say precisely how Bloggs traveled to the murder scene. Though advocates for Bloggs could not produce an alibi for him, they claimed the court's judgment to be absurd if it could not say definitively whether Bloggs took the bus or rode his bike to the scene (or how many seconds late the bus was running).

Lacking evidence or alibis, protesters advanced even stranger arguments to defend Bloggs. The skeptics suggested that if a person could seem to be stabbed by an assailant in all physical respects without actually having been stabbed by an assailant, then there must be some ineffable difference between being physically stabbed by an assailant and actually being stabbed by an assailant. On this basis, they argued that it was unreasonable to convict Bloggs on the basis of physical evidence. The skeptics were elated by the cleverness of the argument, but when asked by a reporter whether the premise of the argument begged the question, the skeptics pretended they hadn't heard the reporter's question.

Overall, protesters said it had been a good day in the Bloggs case, and claimed that their demonstration was evidence that the case against Bloggs was in full retreat, and, indeed, that the practice of relying on physical evidence in court cases would soon be abandoned.

Statistical weight versus gut, aka, more on zombies

2008-07-10T21:55:00.001-07:00

Dualists do not a priori believe that consciousness has a physical component.

Imagine living 500 years ago. Peter says the mind is a physical mechanism, Dave says it's not all physical. Now what are Peter's predictions? Peter's predictions are that every cognitive function can be intercepted or corrupted by physical means. Meanwhile, Dave's predictions are that every cognitive functions may or may not be corrupted by physical means.

Centuries pass, and we find that, at every opportunity, Peter's predictions are validated. Dave's theory has not been absolutely ruled out, but it has been ruled out statistically. What are the odds that Dave's dualism is that one rare form of dualism that looks exactly like Peter's physicalism?

Well, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of Peter. Every experiment that could go Dave's way but doesn't is a factor of two in favor of Peter's theory. Today, one would be guilty of gross fine-tuning (and gap argumentation) to suppose that Dave's theory were likely to be true. Even if Peter had passed only ten tests of physical cognitive function, Dave's theory would still be a million-to-one long shot.

The question is, does the zombie argument impose million(or billion)-to-one statistical argument that can cancel out all of Peter's data for the last five centuries?

No. The premise of the zombie argument is that human zombies are possible, i.e., that physicalism is insufficient to explain qualia. But qualia may not even exist as non-causal elements. Even if our belief favored the existence of non-causal qualia (and mine certainly doesn't), we would not be sure to one part in ten, let alone one part in a million. If we were billion-to-one certain that qualia existed as an non-causal part of the cognitive story, then Dave could happily sustain his debate with Peter. But that's just not the case.

The Placeholder Fallacy

2008-06-06T21:25:00.001-07:00

In physics, we have found a pattern of reduction and unification. James Clerk Maxwell discovered that the electric force and magnetic force are both aspects of a single electromagnetic force. Abdus Salaam, Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow were awarded the Nobel prize for their work in revealing that the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force are two aspects of a single electroweak force. The hope is that, one day, we will unify all of the forces in a "Theory of Everything" (ToE) described by one or two simple equations.

However, as yet, we do not know whether the ToE exists. Some think that a String Theory might turn out to be the ToE, but for all we know, the ToE could be based on a radically different mathematics. For now, a ToE remains an elusive dream.

Imagine two astronomers are looking through a telescope tonight, witnessing a galaxy exploding mysteriously. One astronomer says to the other "Aha! This explosion is explained by the Theory of Everything!"

The other astronomer replies. "Really? What is the Theory of Everything?"

The first astronomer responds "I don't know what the Theory of Everything actually says, but, it being a theory of everything, it must explain this explosion."

Has the first astronomer explained the explosion?

Of course not! The first astronomer is merely using a reference to a theory he does not have. He is using a placeholder for an explanation as if he had the actual explanation.

This is akin to me stepping ashore on an unexplored continent, declaring the tallest mountain to be named "Mount Logic", and then trying to claim credit for the discovery of the tallest mountain on the continent.

Thus, I present you with what I call The Placeholder Fallacy

The Placeholder Fallacy
Treating a reference to an explanation you don't have as if it has explanatory power.

This fallacy is most commonly used by theists when they claim that God can explain the existence of the universe, the fine-tuning of physical constants, or the origin of species. By the definition of a deity, God can certainly perform all of these tasks. This is no different from there being the possibility that an as-yet undiscovered physical law can explain all these things. What the theists really mean is that, if we knew the mind of God, we would have an explanation for these things, not just the possibility of an explanation. But theists generally reject the idea that we can know the mind of God well enough to predict anything like creation of universes, creation of life with common descent, etc. God, or rather the mind of God, is an explanation we do not (and can never) have. It can't explain anything until we know what God was thinking.

Note that if we knew what God was thinking, we could make some predictions, and then God would begin to be explanatory.

How does one expose instances of the placeholder fallacy? If the alleged explanation is prediction-less, just substitute the as-yet undiscovered Theory of Everything for the alleged explanatory agency. If it doesn't work for the ToE, it doesn't work for the agency either.

Example: "God explains the creation of the universe."
Test: "The ToE explains the creation of the universe."

Example: "God explains why this child survived the crash."
Test: "The ToE explains why this child survived the crash."

Example: "God explains why humans can think rationally."
Test: "The ToE explains why humans can think rationally."

Zombie Question-Begging

2008-05-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

We get inferences to reduction even when we're not certain that our reductionist model accounts for every pre-reduction fact. For example, there are some complex systems of water that have not been simulated in terms of H2O molecules because the computational task is beyond our abilities. So it is possible that, say, some kinds of whirlpools cannot be accounted for in terms of H2O. Perhaps such whirlpools require some sort of irreducible water spirit? Yet, we don't doubt that water reduces to H2O. Why?

The argument is roughly like this: irreducible water spirits don't place constraints on experimental tests (while still being relevant to them), whereas physical reductionism does. Experimental results are consistent with the constraints when they needn't have been. Therefore, it is probable that water reduces to H2O.

Suppose there are fair coins and two-headed coins, and I take one of the coins at random and flip it in front of you. It lands heads. What are the odds that the coin is fair? Clearly, it is more likely that the coin is the two-headed coin. Now take this to the Nth power, and you'll see why we don't regard water as consisting of water spirits (fair coins), even if we have not formally reduced every instance of water behavior we have ever observed.

Similarly, there are a great many ways that minds are consistent with physics in ways they needn't have been if minds were not reducible to physics. Hence, it is rational to believe that minds are likely to be physical systems (they might be irreducible, but it is terrifically unlikely because we would be supposing that very special, fine-tuned form of irreducibility that looks just like reducibility wherever we look).

As for the zombie argument, I personally think there's some very subtle question-begging going on. In order for qualia to escape the aforementioned reductionist inference, it has to be claimed that qualia are wholly irrelevant and disconnected with physics. By making this claim, it is also implicitly claimed that qualia cannot have a physical explanation. If this assumption is sustained, then qualia don't have any implementation, so physical minds don't place any more constraints on experiment than do irreducible ones, and the inference to reduction to physical minds fails.

However, if we deny from the start that qualia can have a physical explanation, that's begging the question. There are also multiple arguments to the effect that physically irrelevant qualia don't exist at all.

(Originally a comment on Philosophy Etc.)

Abstractions and Language

2008-04-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

Suppose I see a rabbit for the first time. I know it is small, brown, has four legs, is furry and has big ears. In recognizing the bunny, I have created a filter in my brain - a rabbit recognizer. Anything that is recognized by this filter I will call a "rabbit". This filter is an abstraction because it will recognize any rabbit, including rabbits I have yet to see.

So when I say "rabbits have long ears" I really mean that "my rabbit filter is triggered by (among other things) long ears."

This exposes an important fact about language. It means that when we speak in terms of abstractions, we don't have to be referring to some Platonic ideal or some floating universal. We can be referring to our own faculties, and what would trigger those faculties to recognition.

So when I recognize what a watch is doing when it is keeping time, I automatically create an abstraction filter for time-keeping. I can speak of time-keeping mechanisms in the abstract because I refer to the filter in my mind that recognizes such things. And I can say that the time-keeping ability of this particular watch is due to the mechanical mechanism inside of it.

So when you ask "Is a watch a time-keeper in the absence of minds?" you have to decide what you mean by the question. "Time-keeper" could mean that I presently see and recognize and use the device as a time-keeper. Or "time-keeper" could mean that, if I had such a device here and now, I would recognize it as a time-keeper. You would have to take time-keeper only in the strict, former sense of the word to say that time-keepers would not exist without us. However, taking the word "time-keeper" in this sense is misleading. If I used the first definition, then any watch not in my presence would not be a time-keeper. (And any rabbit yet to be born would not be a rabbit, etc.) No one takes language to mean this. The language is taken such that a device is a time-keeper if it would be recognized as such by a mind, if a mind were present.

Reducing a Watch

2008-04-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from a comment I made over at Dangerous Idea 2. The comments got a little sidetracked from the original post, but the issue at stake is what reduction is about. Does a reductionist theory eliminate phenomena or does it identify one phenomenon with a different one? No....

The watch tells the time. The watch ticks. The hands of the watch move. The watch contains movable springs and gears. The watch has a glass cover and a part that connects it to a strap or watch-chain.

The reductionist theory of watches says that the ticking and the time-telling and the hand movements are caused by the springs and gears working as a mechanism. The reductionist does not say that the hand movements and the time-telling are identical to the springs and gears in the absence of a mechanism.

When the reductionist theory is first put forward, the mechanism is unseen. So we're not saying that something we have seen is something else we have seen. We are saying that something we have yet to see (the mechanism) causes the seen phenomena.

In this case, what we have observed to date about the watch does not contradict the reduction. The ticking, the gears and springs, the time-telling are all still present after the reduction, and they don't disappear after the reduction. The reduction does not eliminate the motion of the hands or the telling of the time. It explains them.

Now, let's backtrack to a time before we decided knew the watch reduced.

A priori (before the reduction), we might think that the watch properties cannot be reduced. We might think that the external properties of the watch are the fundamental ones. For example, we might think time-telling is in the watch as a fundamental property of the whole and cannot be broken down to a mechanism of more fundamental parts.

When we propose irreducibility like this, there will generally be parts in the watch that we can remove without breaking the time-telling. For example, we can remove the glass cover or the parts that connect the watch to a chain or strap. Take off these other parts and the watch continues to tell the time.

When we open the watch and see the springs and gears moving in sync with the hand movements, we have to ask whether they are all fundamental or whether one is more fundamental than the other. For example, maybe it is the intrinsic time-telling that moves the hands, and the hands drive the gears. If that were the case, then the gears and springs are at least as likely to be unnecessary as necessary. Maybe the watch is intrinsically a time-teller, and the gears serve only to cause the ticking.

On what basis do we successfully and completely reduce the watch to a mechanism of gears and springs? Well, the watch reduction is totally successful once we understand the mechanism, and once we can build watches or show that the gears and their mechanism predict the ticking and the time telling.

However, we can make partial reductions without understanding the whole watch. If we find that the watch cannot tell time without the gears, there's (a priori) 2:1 odds that the gears cause the the time-telling (and that time-telling is not fundamental to the watch). This is because if time-telling is fundamental, the time-telling is compatible with gears moving or not moving, but if gears and mechanism are fundamental, the gears must move.

Similarly, if we find that tweaking the gears causes the time-telling to speed up or slow down, then we have another 2:1 (now 4:1) statistical advantage for the reductionist gears theory. If time-telling is fundamental, then it may or may not be possible (2 possibilities) to change the hand movements by tweaking the gears. On the other hand, if the gears and mechanism are fundamental, then it will certainly be possible to change the time-telling rate by tweaking the gears.

In cognitive science, we have performed many partial reductions. If mind or its aspects are fundamental, then we don't need physical brains, physical memories or any of the other things comparable to the gears in the watch. Yet we have them. If minds are fundamental, then we don't need circuits in our brains that function as memory, that recognize, that predict, and that emote. Yet we have all those things. It turns out that just about every function of mind can be tweaked physically or chemically. So while we don't know the whole mechanism, we ought to be well over 99% certain that the mind is not fundamental, and that the neurochemical mechanisms are fundamental to mind.

Specious Explanations: The Short Form

2008-03-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I explored the boundary between the explanatory and the non-explanatory, it it ended up being rather long-winded. Since then, I've condensed my position down to just a few sentences. Here goes...

If your theory predicts nothing then it is not explanatory, for all it does is restate your existing observations.
If your theory is just a reference to (or placeholder for) a theory you don't have, then it isn't explanatory. You cannot explain merely by declaring what you would name an explanation if you had one.
If your theory is predictive, but attributes the prediction to an entity you know nothing about, then the entity in question is not part of the explanation.

Here's the simple test. If you can substitute "Unknown Theory of Everything" for any entity in your theory, then that entity does no explaining in your theory.

Example:

Gravitational force is proportional to inertial mass.
This theory makes many predictions, so it is an explanatory law. However, if you attribute this force to an "Unknown Theory of Everything" then your Theory of Everything isn't adding any explanatory power. If you say Unknown Theory of Everything causes Gravitational force to be proportional to inertial mass, then you're not explaining any more than you did with your original theory.

Example:

At random, God strikes sinners with lightning. We are all sinners, and all guilty in the eyes of God.
This theory isn't predictive, so it explains nothing. Furthermore, its ridiculousness is exposed when we substitute "Unknown Theory of Everything" for God: At random, Unknown Theory of Everything strikes some sinners with lightning.

What counts as a prediction?

2008-03-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

I was describing my theory of explanation to a friend, and he suggested that my definition of a predictive theory was too vague.

He gave the example of a religion which explains airplane accidents based on the sinning nature of people around the world. People sin, therefore God punishes us with airplane accidents that are not necessarily directed at sinners. This theory predicts future airplane accidents if people continue to sin. Does the nonspecific prediction of future airplane accidents count as a proper prediction?

Well, the model being proposed looks something like this:

airplane accidents = God(sin)

If these variables represented the probability of an airplane crash and the aggregate of sin or something along those lines, then my standard argument against the theory would be that the function "God" is not defined. The connection between the two variables would be so mysterious that it would be like an infinite order polynomial, and no foreseeable amount of fine tuning will generate a particular prediction. So the original "explanation" would degenerate into a claim that "if we had a predictive theory, it would be explanatory. If we knew the mind of God, then accidents would be predicted and explained." In other words, this is a reference to an explanation we don't have, and it has no explanatory power.

But my friend was not asking so simple a question. He wants to know how we draw the fine line between a predictive theory and a non-predictive one. In particular, is it possible to weaken the prediction and salvage the theory's explanatory power? Can we rig up this formula to represent the mere existence of airplane accidents and sinning? Can we theorize that the mere existence of sinning implies the existence of airplane accidents?

Well, there are a few things that any such theory would have to avoid if it's going to be more than the false pretense of a prediction. The theory can't claim that the elimination of sin is impossible, or that the other factors in airplane crashes make it impossible to test the claim. If a theory did these things, it would merely be pretending to make predictions.

But let's suppose that the advocates of this hypothetical religious theory accept that sin could be eliminated and that their claim is actually testable in principle, even if difficult in practice. Are there any other problems?

Yes. The problem is that God has nothing to do with the prediction.

Suppose I explain the electrostatic force of attraction between two spheres in terms of the electrical charges on each sphere and the square of the distance between the spheres. This is known in physics as Coulomb's law. That is, I provide my prediction as a formula. I can use this formula to explain the force of attraction between charged objects. I can say that sphere A is attracted to sphere B because of Coulomb's law.

Now suppose that I also attribute the attraction between charged objects to the work of undetectable faeries. Something is obviously wrong with this. Faeries are not known for imposing inverse-square laws of attraction. The existence of faeries does not predict the formula. It has nothing to do with the predictive theory, and has simply been gratuitously slapped onto a naturalistic explanation. In short, the faeries aren't doing any predicting.

I could try to wriggle out of this by saying that faeries are ultimately responsible for the attraction, and that by discovering Coulomb's law of electrostatic attraction, we are learning something new about undetectable faeries. However, I could replace the word "faeries" with undiscoverable Theory of Everything (ToE) and claim the same excuse. Yet, everyone would reject this. If a ToE existed and we knew what it was, the theory of everything would predict the electrostatic attraction formula. However, the ToE isn't doing any explaining here. The predictive power of this theory has no more to do with the ToE than it does with faeries. If we had a theory of faeries which cause electrostatic attraction, such a theory would predict Coulomb's law, but we don't have such a theory of faeries, so the faeries predict nothing.

So, we can extend our original list of specious explanations. An theory loses its explanatory power when the theory

Fails to make any predictions, and merely restates our observations.
Fails to make a prediction because it refers to a theory that we do not have (even though the theory would be predictive if we actually knew any of its details).
Makes a prediction, but fallaciously attributes the explanatory power of the predictive relationship to parts of the theory that are non-predictive.

Most of the time when theories fall prey to this last error, they are positing some entity that is alleged to be responsible for the prediction in question. The key to uncovering the error is to ask how this entity is defined.

If the entity refers to the prediction rule itself, there's no problem. This is the case in a scientific law, like Coulomb's law. It is the law itself that is responsible for the prediction (or rather it is simply the nature of the stuff one is observing that it follows the law). Similarly, a physical theory (which leads to many laws) is no problem because posits entities that are components of the prediction-making mechanism. For example, while quarks have never been seen directly, they are the focus for generating many rules about the behaviors of elementary particles. Yet, quarks do not refer to anything more than this. Quarks do not have any existence beyond the predictive theory. For example, quarks do not have any moral status because they are not part of any predictive moral theory.

On the other hand, if the responsible entity is defined outside of our rule-making system, it may be illicit. This is the case for God and the Theory of Everything. In such cases, the entity is presumed to exist independent of any particular set of predictions.

Of course, there is a way for the entity to be defined outside of the rule-making system and yet not be illicit. If the entity is already defined as an element of a known rule-making system, then the entity may have a chance to be explanatory. Here's an example.

The Pacific Ocean is part of a predictive model. If you go to the Western coast of the United States, you'll see a very large body of cool, salty water. This body usually has waves breaking on the shore. This body of water is called the Pacific Ocean, and it is predictive in space, time and numerous physical properties. Hence, if I am in Los Angeles and I walk far enough to the west, I predict I will get my feet wet. Why? Because I have this predictive thing called the Pacific Ocean that is defined by its geographic and physical properties.

Now suppose I am trying to explain the formation of Monterey Bay. I can theorize that the Bay was caused by the action of the Pacific. In this case, the Pacific is not being invented for the purposes of explaining the bay. Rather, it was invented to explain other things, but may also explain the erosion of Monterey Bay. The Pacific becomes explanatory of Monterey Bay when a mechanism is cited by which the Pacific can erode bays.

Every explanatory entity can be defined as "that which predicts X." God and invisible faeries are not defined by what they predict, and so they fail to be explanatory.

Critics of this conclusion will say that not everything that exists is predictive. In other words, they may argue that God exists and is a meaningful concept even if God predicts nothing. I disagree, but this point is irrelevant. The question at hand is whether an entity is explanatory, not whether it exists.

I apologize for the verbosity and lack of clarity in this post. It took me a while to think it through. I'm sure I'll come up with abbreviated ways of saying the same thing.

The Financial Security Objection

2008-03-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

My friend R is a conservative. The other day, we discussed the regressive tax strategies advocated by Republicans. R did not dispute my objections to such schemes, but instead settled on an honest and simple statement of his motivations.

R's concern was about his family's ability to accumulate wealth. He noted that during the Great Depression, wealthy Americans were adversely affected by the economic conditions, but unlike working class folk, the wealthy were not devastated. In contrast, working families were devastated. So my friend espouses a strategy in which he will accumulate a lot of wealth, and by preventing the government from taking his money, he will then be in a relatively good position should another Great Depression occur.

I don't know whether or not this is the typical belief held by conservatives, but I'm sure my friend is not alone. We are all driven by some combinations of fears and hopes about economic outcomes. R's fear is that taxation will leave him without any hope of surviving an economic collapse.

Needless to say, I have some issues with this kind of strategy.

During the Great Depression, there were shanty towns where people lived in crates and old pipes and anything else they could find. However, as far as I can tell, only a small minority of the population fell victim to this outcome. If it were the demise of the average Joe, the majority of Americans would have lived in Hoovervilles, and that doesn't seem to have been the case. Instead, most Americans endured significant hardships (unemployment went as high as 25%), but most were not rendered homeless. Only the few super-wealthy folk survived unscathed.

So, first, if we had to define the boundaries of the economic classes during the Great Depression, we probably would say that there was a minority of truly destitute persons, a large majority of persons with lower standard of living, and a teeny, tiny sliver of super wealthy folk. This means that all one has to do to avoid being in the destitute minority is to be in the 25th percentile or better. My friend R already does this handily. However, R is not rich. He's not a billionaire (unless he's not telling me something!), and so he's not going to be unaffected by a Great Depression. In other words, while more wealth is always better, it's unlikely that having the upper tax brackets pay 5-10% more in tax is really going to save R much grief should a depression occur.

Second, no Democrats are proposing taxing the wealthy at much more than the rates we had under Bill Clinton. At those tax rates, not only do wealthy people survive, they thrive. The wealthy Republicans who whined about taxes under Clinton are just plain greedy. They were getting incredibly rich, but somehow it wasn't enough for them.

Third, the strategy my friend is advocating is pessimistic. Rather than go for a strategy that is likely to make the nation solvent and better able to prevent a depression, my friend wants to apply a strategy that will make a depression far more likely to occur. Indeed, some analysts have said that the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have-nots was a primary cause of the Great Depression. The wealth gap today is getting far greater (far worse) because of years of Republican rule. I cannot imagine how the expectation value of R's wealth improves by his paying a few percent lower taxes at the expense of national solvency.

So I think R's strategy is wrong for me, wrong for the nation, and wrong for R himself. It is better for R to prevent a depression through sensible policy than it is to encourage a depression in the hopes that the depression-encouraging strategy will leave R with a little more padding when the depression comes.

In other words, I'm all for selfish strategies, but I think that selfish long-sighted economic strategies are better than selfish short-sighted ones.

Specious Explanations

2008-02-29T14:47:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of bad explanations I've blogged about in the past.

The first kind is the restatement of data. If we look at the data points on a graph, and our explanation is equivalent to drawing dots over the data points, then we're not explaining the points, merely restating them.

The second kind of specious explanation is the reference to an explanation we do not have. "God" is an example of this. In theory, if God were visible and we knew the mind of God and had his omniscience, God's actions would be explained by his choosing the best solution in each case. However, we don't have any of those things, and so God refers to an explanation we don't have.

In both cases, the way to avoid the trap is to have in one's hands a predictive model. It may not actually be the correct model, but at least it is explanatory. In the first case, points on the graph are explained by a particular curve (or a limited class of curves) passing through those data points. In the second case, God is only explanatory when we know what actions were God's, why he acted as he did, and what his actions are likely to be in the future.

In describing these specious cases to a friend, it occurred to me that these two varieties of fallacy are two sides of the same coin.

Suppose that we have a graph with data points on it, and we propose that they are explained by a curve passing through the points. So far so good. Under normal circumstances, we would fit N data points to an Mth-order polynomial, where M < N. That way, we can fit the polynomial to the data and make a prediction (by interpolation or extrapolation).

However, if I only have two data points and I propose to fit the points to a 2nd-order (quadratic) polynomial which requires three parameters, then my theory is under-determined. I need another data point to know what the polynomial looks like. Nonetheless, this is acceptable as an explanation because it makes the prediction that I can measure another data point, then make predictions from there.

Now, if we were to describe the space of all possible explanations, what would it look like? It would look like an unknown-order polynomial. For such a polynomial, we have no idea how many data points need to be accumulated before a predictive pattern emerges. Moreover, it is impossible to make any predictions from the unknown-order polynomial. A Kth-order polynomial (where K is finite and specified) would make a definite prediction, but an unknown-order polynomial can't do that much.

Hence, the first variety of specious explanation, the restatement, is equivalent to the second variety, a reference to an explanation we don't have.

As a clarification, I am talking about potential explanations here. Explanatory power. The explanatory power of a theory I do not yet have is zero! I'm not just saying that "God" is an unconfirmed theory, I'm saying that it's a non-explanatory theory (if it even merits the title "theory").

To add insult to injury, supernaturalists will argue that predictions about supernatural causes are not just an unknown distance away, but are fundamentally impossible. They don't merely invoke an unknown-order polynomial, but an infinite-order one.

Libertarianism as Oppression

2007-12-29T09:01:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me today that libertarianism is, ironically, oppressive.

Most people most of the time are only concerned about short term gains. What's for dinner tonight? What's on TV? Where will my high school senior go to college? Will my new car have decent resale value in 6 years? Will I have time to grab a bite to eat before the recital this evening? Can I afford to get my foot fixed by the podiatrist?

Only rarely do people consider questions about collective ethics and well being. What should we do about global warming? What can we do to ensure universal access to health care? How can we improve education for everyone?

These collective questions need to be settled collectively. I cannot unilaterally decide how health care should be implemented or how global warming should be solved (or decide if it is a problem).

Humans need informed, collective decision-making. Individuals need to be asked to think about the long term.

How you approach the question of global warming is different when you're deciding what car to buy for yourself versus what legislation should be passed. In the first case, you are asked to consider what your personal comforts will be like for the next few years. In the latter case, you are asked to consider your children's futures. And so the answers you give in each case are different.

I want my sports car, and I am happy to pay the true cost of that decision. However, I don't want to make a futile sacrifice all by myself. For example, I don't want to take the difference between the price of my car and what I think it ought to cost, and contribute it to a private pro-environmental organization that may never make any progress. I will just be cheating myself out of the cash. But if I know that everyone will pay a price, I will think the deal is fair.

Likewise, if I buy a hybrid, I'll pay a bunch more and do very little to affect carbon emissions by myself. I may make a statement with my purchase, but that's not an effective way to solve the problem if only a few percent of buyers buy hybrids. The only way to make the sacrifice effective is to enact legislation that will ensure that there will be enough hybrid purchases to make a positive difference to the environment.

Libertarianism wants to strip us all of the option to make these sorts of collective decisions, i.e., strip us of the right to make binding decisions about our long-term future. So, ironically, libertarianism is a form of oppression. We are not allowed to engage in collective decision-making, but instead we must all sit idly by while the people of the world thinks only about what it wants on its pizza tonight. In a libertarian society, we're not allowed to organize people to make binding decisions.

The only people who get to make binding decisions are those with the personal economic power to make a decisive difference. Who are they? They are the billionaires and the CEO's who run the worlds largest cartels and corporations. Libertarianism is great for them.

Of course, there is a long litany of other reasons why libertarianism is flawed and impractical, but this argument seems like it may be the most compelling of all.

Non-thinking things can't see subjective attributes

2007-12-05T18:18:00.001-08:00

Is morality objective or subjective (relative)?

To answer this we have to be specific about what the question means. When I perceive a property of a thing, that property could be in the thing itself, or it could be an attribute that is "painted on the thing" by my mind.

For example, I might say that a particular building has many properties including these two: it is 100 feet in height, and it is tall. If I were from rural Kansas, any building over 50 feet in height would be tall to me. However, if I were from the city of Chicago, a building would have to be over 500 feet in height for me to consider it to be tall. So it is quite obvious that my personal history determines what is tall, whereas height is unambiguous, no matter where I come from. Height is objective, but tallness is a property my mind subjectively paints onto objects with height.

Now, there are two ways I can establish the objective/subjective nature of an attribute. I can positively show that an attribute is objective by finding evidence that the attribute is independent of subjectivity, or I can positively show that the attribute is a subjective property generated when a mind sees objective attributes of other things.

In the case of tallness, we certainly have positive evidence that tallness depends on where you come from and what experiences you have had. We can predict that anyone who has not seen a building more than one story tall will think that the Empire State Building is very tall.

But what would be considered positive evidence of objectivity?

I realized last night that subjective attributes are invisible to non-thinking entities.

Suppose I hold a conical projectile in my hand. The projectile is 10 centimeters long and has a mass of 1 kilogram. I fire it at a metal plate, and the way the plate behaves upon impact depends upon the mass. Yet the plate has no subjectivities of its own because it cannot think. If the mass were a subjective attribute painted on the projectile by my mind (e.g., say, if all 10cm conical objects subjectively feel like they are 1 kilo masses), then why should an inanimate target care about my subjectivities?

One might suggest that the apparent attributes of the debris are also subjective inventions, and that is why they appear correlated. However, this would be rather a coincidence. And we can establish increasingly complicated experiments that will force us to argue for increasingly bizarre coincidences should we stick to the idea that mass is subjective. Thus, we have to give up the idea that mass is a subjective quantity.

Furthermore, we can devise ways to hide from us every attribute of a projectile except for its mass. In that case, it cannot be that mass is some subjective mental decoration we apply to objects with other objective attributes (like size, shape or color).

Yet, with morality, there is no similar evidence of objectivity.

There is no way to create a curtain through which only 'evil' passes. If we could do so, we would have strong positive evidence that evil was objective and not some invention of our minds.

Also, there's no evidence that good and evil affect the environment. If an evil act occurs, it leaves no trace on non-thinking entities. A barrel of oil that was stolen burns as long and as brightly as a barrel of oil that was fairly obtained.

While there may be theories of morality (e.g., the Golden Rule), these theories predict nothing but our own subjective feelings and tendencies. They are not like objective physical theories that predict the behavior of non-mental entities. Rather, moral theories predict the behavior of mental entities that have subjectivities.

In addition to this lack of evidence for the objectivity of morality, there is a growing mountain of positive evidence for the psychological and evolutionary nature of moral perception.

Dompamine and superstition

2007-10-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

Sharon Begley writes in Newsweek:

As scientists probe deeper into the brain for what underlies superstition, they have found a surprising suspect: dopamine, which usually fuels the brain's sense of reward. In one study, two groups of people, either believers in the supernatural or skeptics, looked at quickly displayed images of faces and scrambled faces, real words and nonwords. The goal was to pick out the real ones. Skeptics called more real faces nonfaces, and real words nonwords, than did believers, who happily saw faces and words even in gibberish. But after the skeptics were given L-dopa, a drug that increases dopamine, their skeptical threshold fell, and they ID'd more faces and words as real. That suggests that dopamine inclines the brain to see patterns even in random noise.

Interesting!

Physical Abstractions

2007-10-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

Over at Victor Reppert's blog, I've been confronting a form of the argument from reason (AfR). The AfR takes many forms, but the basic scheme is to say that there's something about the process of inference that makes it impossible to explain with any naturalistic model.

In this particular case, the AfR argues that inference is invariant across all possible universes, and that means that inference is physics independent. The argument then says that a thing that is physics independent is non-physical, and, therefore, no naturalistic theory can explain that thing.

I find it easy to see that this argument fails because I can cite counterexamples. The best one I have found so far is the concept of a plasma. A plasma is a high-density, high-temperature state wherein bound states in a medium lose their identity, and the medium becomes a soup of bound-state components and force-carriers. An ionic plasma is an ionized gas, of the type you find in a neon light. In an ionic plasma, atoms become unbound, and you get a soup of electrons, ions, and photons.

However, long after we learned of ionic plasmas, we discovered that there might be quark-gluon plasmas (QGP). In a QGP, we have a soup of quarks and gluons instead of bound nuclei. The physics of QGP, known as quantum chromodynamics, is completely different from the physics of ionic plasmas, which are electromagnetic.

This means that plasma is an abstraction that is physics independent. Indeed, we can imagine very different universes that would support plasmas. Yet, if the ability of an abstraction to apply across universes with different physics were a sign that the abstraction were non-physical, we would have to conclude that plasmas were non-physical. Clearly, plasmas are physical phenomena, and so the premise about the physical portability of abstractions is false.

Here is a systematic dismemberment of the argument. The argument goes like this:

1) We can abstract the possibility of other lawful universes.

2) In every abstraction of a lawful universe, there is a different set of laws.

3) However, every such universe contains common set of laws that establish non-contradiction. (Without these, the laws would predict an outcome and its negation, and not be laws at all.)

4) The conditions under which one classifies an inference as valid are common across every universe. In other words, inference is a specification that is independent of all the laws in the universe except the common logical laws.

5) Premise: Assume that minds in our universe are the result of physical processes of our universe.

6) Any physical system that meets a non-physical criterion must be portable across universes without changes.

7) Minds in our universe would cease to function if physical laws were changed. That is, changing physical laws of our universe without changing anything else in our universe (e.g., the structure of brains), would result in systems that no longer meet the specification for a mind that makes correct inferences.

8) Physical minds are not portable across universes without breaking the criterion or requiring redesign.

9) Therefore, due to (6), assumption (5) is incorrect.

This argument fails because (6) is false.

(6) is false because we can imagine more counterexamples like the following. A "hammer" is an example of an abstract, non-physical criterion that can apply to matter. A hammer is something that amplifies hardness and pressure with kinetic energy. Hammers can exist in a great many universes. Consider a universe slightly different from our own, one in which Iron is a liquid or a gas. An Iron hammer in this alternate universe would no longer meet the abstract criterion for being classified as a hammer. However, in the alternate universe, we could make a hammer with a brass head that meets the abstract criteria. Clearly, physical specifics do not have to be portable across universes for there to be physical implementations in other universes. There will certainly be universes that cannot support hammers, but this is not important.

There's another confusion buried in the argument. What does it mean when we say that correct inference is fixed in all lawful universes? Presumably, these other universes do not actually exist, so we are not referring to physical universes. Rather, we are referring to abstractions. We are saying that if we create an abstraction for another universe, that abstraction is subject to rules of inference. Hence, the very portability of inference is not across physical systems, but across abstractions of physical systems. That is, a mind needs to be able to port inferences across its own abstractions. Here's the experiment. If I create a physical implementation of a mind, and that mind creates abstractions for other universes, then that mind must be able to apply rules of inference to its abstractions of other universes. That's the burden a physical mind has to meet.

Hello, Angry Christians

2007-09-30T09:48:00.001-07:00

Pat Condell says Hello, Angry Christians.

Eliminative Reductionism

2007-09-13T17:52:00.000-07:00

Quoting Paul & Patricia Churchland, Victor Reppert describes three kinds of reductionism: conservative, reforming and eliminative reductionism (ER).

Victor cites examples of the three different types of reductionism. However, I noticed that one of these examples is not like the others, and two of these examples are kinda the same!

The reduction of temperature to mean kinetic energy is given as an example of conservative reduction. Let's look at what these terms are. Temperature is something that is sensed more or less directly. Temperature is not an explanation. Temperature is simply being explained by the reduction to mean kinetic energy.

The reduction of Newtonian mass to relativistic mass is cited as an example of reforming reduction. Mass (or, weight, at least) is directly sensed, like temperature. Mass is not an explanation. The reduction replaces on explanation with another that is simply more precise.

The cited example of eliminative reduction is the replacement of phlogiston in favor of chemical oxidation. However, phlogiston isn't directly sensed. Combustion is sensed. Phlogiston is an explanation for something sensed (the combustion), and one that happens to be wrong. In this case, the eliminative reduction completely eliminates one explanation that doesn't work and replaces it with one that does.

We see a pattern here. Reduction is a form of explanation. Either we:

a) Introduce an explanation for something sensed, (conservative reduction)
b) Refine an existing explanation for something sensed, (reforming reduction)
c) Replace a failed explanation for something sensed with an effective explanation. (eliminative explanation)

The problem arrives if we mistakenly think that ER replaces the thing sensed with an explanation instead of replacing the faulty explanation for that sensed thing. I believe this is the mistake made by dualists when they cite ER in their arguments.

ER is invoked by dualists who claim that the reduction of certain human mental qualities to material systems eliminates those qualities. The argument sort of runs like this:

1) I feel X.
2) X is explained by a physical theory.
3) X is eliminated because it is merely the action of atoms (or whatnot).
4) Ignoring X as a delusion is unimaginable or threatens my ability to perform this syllogism.
5) Therefore, it is better to trust (1) than accept (2).

The flaw in the argument is in step (3). The direct sensations and experiences are not eliminated by ER. They are explained and predicted by ER. The only thing being eliminated are competing explanations that don't fare as well.

Let's look at free will in particular. Here' I'm talking about free will as a sensation or direct experience, not as an explanation for experiences.

The direct experience of free will is this: I perceive a selection of possible actions, I predict the outcome of each possible action, choose the action that I prefer, and see that my choice generally results in the intended effect. In this way, my choices have made a difference, and I have displayed apparent agency.

If my thinking process and my preferences were shown to be material mechanisms, this direct experience is unaltered. The direct experience is simply explained in terms of a prediction of physics. Free will is not eliminated.

What is eliminated? What is eliminated is the "idea" that there is some alternative to determinism and randomness known as "free choice". Yet this idea of "free choice" is not a direct experience. We don't directly sense that the world is non-deterministic. Rather, "free choice" is a supposed explanation for our actual experiences. (I hesitate to call "free choice" an explanation at all because it is neither predictive, nor logically coherent.)

So, a mechanistic theory of mind does not eliminate direct experiences free will. It eliminates a faulty and incoherent explanation for those experiences. And it is the role of every good explanation to displace poor ones.

The surge is working! So let's draw down troop numbers!

2007-09-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Yes, the Bush plan is just sooo coherent.

I don't know whether we should get out of Iraq now, or wait until we get a Democratic president. A withdrawal will require a major diplomatic initiative, and Bush has neither the competence nor the credibility to pull off anything remotely diplomatic.

2007-09-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

I was just searching for A.J. Ayer quotes online when I came across this brilliant idea at Everything2 by one Rose Thorn:

There are those who caricature Ayer (And the other Positivists), saying "AJ Ayer said that 'Any statement that is not empirically verifiable is nonsense'; Unfortunately this statement isn't empirically verifiable, therefore it is either untrue or nonsense." They are ill-educated cockweasels, fatuously trying to score points.

Ayer considered statements to be "literally meaningful" if they were either empirically decidable, or if they were analytic statements. Analytic statements are statements concerning a formal system. These systems need to start with certain postulates and definitions. The definition of literal meaning is just that: a definition that underlies the entire Positivist discourse.

If you find anyone caricaturing the positivists in this way, kill them. It's better for all of us. If you are a beginner at this, the best way is with "Language, Truth, and Logic" (The revised edition with the giant introduction acknowledging the flaws in the work).

LOL! I love it!

Intuition and Explanation

2007-09-05T21:08:00.000-07:00

What is an explanation?

We start from an intuition about the relationship between a proposition and a phenomenon.

For example, regarding the phenomenon "car crash." We notice a pattern in which the proposition "the driver was drunk" relates to the car crash phenomenon in a way that "apple pie was in the trunk" does not.

Another example, regarding the phenomenon that the "floor is slippery." We notice that "floor is brown" does not relate to the slippery floor phenomenon in the same way as "floor is wet."

We call this relation "explanation." This is our starting point. It is the primary intuition that there are explanatory relations.

The next step is to try to devise a formal definition of an explanation. Our formal definition should account for why "drunk driver" explains "car crash", but "pie in trunk" does not. Though our formal definition may be inspired by intuition, our definition should work without direct reference to intuition when examining any particular case.

In devising a formal definition of explanation, we must account for other intuitions about explanations.

First, it is intuitive that not everything is explained. If everything were explained, we wouldn't need or notice or search-for explanations. There is a distinction to be made. Some things are unexplained.

Second, I think it is intuitive that "car crash" does not explain "car crash". Restating the phenomenon does not make an explanation.

Third, it is intuitive that there must be some relevancy between the explanation and what is being explained.

These intuitions can come into conflict.

Our gut might tell us that "X explains Y, where X is defined as that which explains Y." However, this gut instinct would contradict the other intuition that trivialities are not explanatory. Upon reflection, we see that X merely labels the explanation without saying what it actually is.

This conflict is one reason why we want formal definitions of explanation. The idea is that we can at least classify explanations into types according to their conformance with all of our intuitions.

My claim is that the triviality intuition is more important than the primary intuition. The primary intuition tells us that there is a distinction, but the other intuitions tell us more specifically what isn't an explanation.

If we accept trivial explanations, we are saying that everything is at least a little bit explained automatically just by restating what it is we're explaining. I think we would be fooling ourselves if we accepted trivialities as explanations.

This is why prediction is a good formal criterion for explanation. It demands that an explanation be relevant to the observations by predicting them, and demands that the explanation not be a restatement of our observations. It also accounts for the fact that some phenomena remain unexplained because we lack predictive models of those phenomena.

Worldviews and Progress

2007-08-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

I think there's a very strong correlation between one's religious and political outlook and one's perception of historical progress.

There's always room for improvement, but I don't think you'll find any reasonable metric by which man has failed to make progress on a per-capita basis. Wars are less deadly (even accounting for the Holocaust), torture is less common, health is better, psychiatric treatment is better, people are less likely to fly into a rage, people are less likely to approve of murder (or rape or torture) by their own tribe, there's less crime, a lower infant mortality, more opportunity, far better labor conditions... the list goes on and on. Quality of life is improving dramatically.

Consider a recent story I heard on the radio. Authorities are shocked that the U.S. rate of maternal death during childbirth spiked to 13 per 100,000. Tragic indeed. But at the start of the 20th century, the rate was about 1 in 100. It's almost 100 times better today than it was a century ago. And the rate is thought to be increasing because, among other reasons, women have the option to have children later.

There are certainly new dangers. We now have an ability to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons. And, if nukes were in regular use, one might be justified in citing a lack of progress, but they haven't been used since their debut. They guaranteed the peace for decades.

And yet I have noted a cynicism on the part of right-wing and religious bloggers. In a recent comment here, someone suggested that the Dark Ages were no worse that the present age. What a bizarre statement.

How is it possible for an informed person to maintain the perception that we're not making progress?

Perhaps the detractors find the dynamics of modern society scarier than the world we leave behind (with its myriad of ills). Yet, this, too, would be a strange phenomenon. Would anyone truly be so disturbed by the modern world that they would be more comfortable living in a society where disease claimed 50% of children before adulthood? Is the freedom of their neighbor to watch pornography worse than slavery? Is their own freedom to watch pornography worse than the black death? One has to wonder.

The Enemies of Reason

2007-08-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins has a new TV show in the UK called The Enemies of Reason.

You can see it now on YouTube. It's great stuff. Let's hope that PBS picks this up.

Richard Carrier: One of the most important voices on the Internet

2007-08-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

On his blog, Richard Carrier takes on an evil and insidious scheme to rewrite history. Christian authors and their supporting bloggers are becoming Dark Age deniers.

The Dark Ages are a bit of a problem for Christians. You see, classical civilization had science, mathematics, medicine, roads, irrigation, even democracy in places. But when Christianity became dominant in Rome, all of that came to an abrupt end. Christians, with their demand that no alternative viewpoints be heard, swept across the Western world, destroying libraries and silencing the voices of reason. Not for a year. Not for a century. But for at least 800 years. Talk about a holocaust!

Of course, this tends to look rather bad for Christianity. And for a long time, Christians had to admit that the Dark Ages were not their finest hour (or their finest 7 million hours).

But now, things are different. People aren't paying attention. Christians have learned that if you just keep lying, you probably won't get called on your bullshit. So the Dark Ages are now... a wonderful, conservative breath of fresh air after the irrational exuberance and excesses of the classical age.

There was no Dark Age, they say. People prefer the term "Middle Ages" now. True. But as Carrier says, any time you lose 90% of your knowledge, that's an age worthy of the term DARK!!!

Instead, the Christians tell us that the inventions of the Middle Ages were underrated. They claim that there was dramatic progress, but it just seemed like there wasn't any. Yes, folks, roads were an expensive luxury, an excess of the Roman era!

As a physicist, I can tell you that the sciences were pretty much died when Christianity put its boot on Europe's neck. There's a long litany of Greek advances, followed by nothing until the Renaissance. And those advances made in the Renaissance were imperiled by the church. Christians also say that the church was not against Galileo's work, only Galileo's bad attitude, and his sloppy experimentalism. Yeah, that's what it was. The church was so concerned about systematic error and statistics that they put Mr. G under house arrest for publishing his results. Funny thing is, the church also banned any mention of heliocentrism. Puts the revised Christian history of science to shame for the lie that it is.

I could go on all night, but it's better to read some of Carrier's posts (especially here and here) on the topic rather than getting everything second-hand from me.

This is scary stuff. Don't let the revisionists excise their injustices from the historical records.

Progressive Naivete

2007-08-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of Democrats and progressives lamenting the recent House decision to permit further government wiretapping without FISA oversight. Unfortunately, a lot of these well-meaning folk are calling the Democrats spineless surrender-monkeys. That's EXACTLY what the Republicans want. It's self-defeating and naive for progressives to strike at their own people in the name of ideological purity.

The recent bill is a 6-month stop gap measure. This is not the ideal outcome, but it's good strategy on the part of Democrats (and maybe better policy than having no surveillance at all). There's no point in Reid and Pelosi spilling valuable treasure just to go down in PR flames at the end of the day.

We should be playing up the story that Bush is threatening the Bill of Rights in the name of national security, and that the Democrats are taking the mature, sophisticated, nuanced and responsible position.

Knock the party on pragmatic grounds, if you must. Spin the results in your favor, and elect Democrats in 2008. Once we have a veto-proof majority (or a Democratic president), our government will start to look more like the humane, responsible and competent one we deserve.

Intuitions of Free Will

2007-08-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

This is a rehash of a comment I made at Thinking Christian earlier this week.

Theists at TC argue that our intuition is that free will is incompatible with determinism (or determinism plus randomness). Consequently, they argue that free will cannot be physical. However, I think they confuse two intuitions.

Let's distinguish two circumstances:

(1) Irrelevant Choice: a final state arrives, no matter what choice you make.

(2) Deterministic Choice: your choice was fixed by past states of affairs (your preferences and computing ability are fixed by the past).

Do you see a difference between these two?

In principle, cases (1) and (2) might occur from time to time whether the universe were physical or not.

Irrelevant Choice could occur under supernaturalism, e.g., if an asteroid is about to hit your house, your choices won't stop it under physicalism and won't stop it under supernaturalism.

Deterministic Choice is typically associated with physicalism, but could happen under some forms of supernaturalism too.

However, Irrelevant Choice does not always occur under supernaturalism, and does not always occur under deterministic physicalism. Under deterministic physicalism, I still make decisions and can often prevent things from happening by my desire to avoid a final state, even if my choice and action could have been forecast in the past. I am aware that my actions and thoughts are affecting the future, and this awareness deterministically alters my course.

I think theists confuse Irrelevant and Deterministic Choice. Under Irrelevant Choice, though I still wouldn't say that I don't have any agency, it might be fair to say that I don't have effective agency vis-a-vis the inevitable event. That is, my thinking process, whether deterministic or otherwise, cannot stop the event.

But Irrelevant Choice isn't what physicalism entails. At least, it entails it no more frequently than supernaturalism.

Physicalism often entails Deterministic Choice, but it doesn't deny agency, the self, or decision-making capability.

Here's one more way to see the difference between the two cases. In Irrelevant Choice scenarios, the final state is consistent with any choice you make. (For example, the surprise asteroid will impact no matter what you decide.) However, in general, under Deterministic Choice, the final state must be consistent with your choice.

I look forward to getting a response from the folks at TC.

When Theism Is Like An M.C. Escher Drawing

2007-08-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

There's a form of argument I've seen from theists that drives me bananas.

It generally takes this form:

Skeptic: To the extent that we can apply reasoning, I can prove X, given Y. We all agree that Y is the case, so X is the case.

Believer: I agree that Y is the case, but I deny X.

Skeptic: You object to my proof?

Believer: No. I deny your ability to apply reason to the problem.

Skeptic: Are you saying the world is illogical?

Believer: No. The world is logical.

Skeptic: You are agnostic about X?

Believer: No. I deny X.

Skeptic: Well, if you deny our ability to apply reason to the problem, how do you obtain a reasoned inference to your disbelief in X?

Believer: It's an inference to the best explanation.

Skeptic: Huh? How can you have an inference without reason?

Believer: I have lots of reasons to disbelieve X. But I still deny your ability to apply reason to the problem.

How does this sort of defense work?

The Alleged Limitations of Models
People are used to thinking that symbolic reasoning is very limited, and cannot be applied in many circumstances. Many times in debates, theists have argued that human thinking and behavior cannot be modeled statistically. This is false. The actual fact is that human behavior cannot be predicted with total precision (at least not yet), but that's not the same thing as statistical modeling. For example, if it were Freaky Friday, and your wife swapped bodies with your daughter, you would likely see the difference because their behaviors would deviate from the statistical norm. Indeed, without statistical models, there would be no such thing as personality.

Unwillingness to Question Assumptions
The theist's denial of our ability to model a thing is common whenever the thing is allegedly magical. According to most theists, humans are magical because they have magical free will, magical reasoning ability and magical moral sensitivity. It's fair to say that the theist's intuition is that these things are magical. That is, it is a natural, unjustified belief that free will is magical.

Yet, philosophy is all about questioning our beliefs. If a belief is not formally justified, we ought to question it. In the case of free will arguments, theists argue that our experience free will requires that the world not be deterministic. This is unsupportable because, if the world were deterministic, no one would notice the difference.

Circular Argumentation
When I am able to make a very persuasive Bayesian probabilistic case for my position, my argument is rejected because the odds have been tipped in circular fashion. This applies across their entire world view.

There are generally three categories of evidence that are cited by believers: historical, personal, and philosophical. None of these alone has persuasive force, and some theists admit that you have to examine the big picture. Unfortunately, this big picture examination consists of circular reasoning.

It goes like this. Examine the historical evidence. The evidence, say, for the Resurrection of Christ, is utterly abysmal. Even if we thought the odds of the Bible being a fabrication were a million-to-one against, we would still rationally have to believe that the odds of the Resurrection were at least a thousand-to-one against. "Ah," say the theists, "that's only if you ignore the philosophical and personal evidences! However, I don't have time to go into them all in this discussion of historical evidences."

Sounds potentially reasonable. Yet, when we discuss the personal evidences for miracles, and I point out that it is irrational to believe that a particular event was an answered prayer, the theist refers me to the philosophical and historical evidences (which they can't go into at that moment).

And, of course, when we discuss the philosophical arguments, we are told that symbolic rational inquiry is useless, just as it is when applied to the historical and personal lines of evidence.

The theist world view is like an M.C. Escher drawing. Each line of evidence looks as if it's supported by the other two lines, but in the grand scheme, none of the lines can support themselves.

Is there still a refuge left for the theist? One might argue that every world view relies on some unprovable statements. I think this is so. My unprovable truths are the axioms of rationality. I'm happy to state them, and happy to admit that I can't rationally prove the laws I use to reach rational conclusions.

However, the arguments against the theist's lines of evidence are not just neutralizing. They're destructive. For example, it's not rational to believe that it is likely that Christ was resurrected, or that the sunny weather is God's answer to a prayer, unless you're willing to believe lots of other improbable things are actually the case.

While the theist can't make a case just from the axioms of rationality, the theist could add in some new axioms. One axiom could be that, say, Christ was resurrected, even if, by the evidences, that's improbable. Another would be that, when I feel like a prayer is answered, it is answered. If these axioms are added to the theist's world view, the evidences will support their conclusion.

I think it's clear that this is a losing proposition. I can prove any conspiracy theory I want by resorting to additional axioms that have no supporting evidence. For example, a theory that JFK was shot by Martians can always be rescued by proposing the axiom that Martians exist, and the axiom that they have it in for any leader who meaningfully supports the space program. But this is absurd.

Sure we can always get to a conclusion by proposing axioms that make the conclusion necessary. We don't do it because, if we did, we would suck all the utility out of rational inference. The utility of rationality isn't merely in its ability to portray a consistent picture. It's power is in its ability to tell us which picture is more probable.

The Universe is Supernatural

2007-07-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to say a condition is natural?

It means that the condition was necessarily caused by some prior condition according to a rule. That the natural condition was determined by past facts and laws.

That means that a non-natural (supernatural) condition is one that is not so determined. A supernatural condition is one that is random, and inexplicable. There's no explanation for such a condition because one cannot (in principle) point to any facts of past conditions that predict it.

Naturalism rejects the idea that there are supernatural explanations. That's because it is nonsensical to say that an event is both explained and inexplicable.

As I've said before, the naturalist need not make any strong negative claims about the non-existence of the supernatural. There's no need to say that nothing supernatural ever happens. Supernatural things might happen every day, and those things would appear to us as unexplained events.

Well, I've come to believe that one can say that there may well be at least one supernatural thing: the sum of all laws of the universe. There cannot be any explanation for the universe itself, because that would require some set of external or prior circumstances that determined its state. Yet any such determinant would require new laws, in which case, we're no longer explaining the universe, but only a part of it.

I don't see that my conclusion makes any significant difference to the substance of these debates, but it does help to answer those who recognize that there are some questions that cannot be answered by natural laws. With them I will agree, but that doesn't really help their case. It simply means that there are some questions that cannot be answered at all.

The Barbarians are at the gates!

2007-06-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

So, I'm visiting a Borders bookstore when I find a really nice atheist-themed end-cap.

I came across Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis, and it's a great book. It makes a lot of the same points I have made over the last few years.

I also read some excerpts of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I quite enjoyed what I read, but it's not the kind of thing I like to read for extended periods. It's a bit depressing.

This end-cap was in a nice prominent position in the store, so I had a good feeling...

Until I got to the very back of the science section, and was horrified to see three "Politically Incorrect Guides" under the "new and noteworthy in science" end cap.

First there was Tom Bethell's PIG "Science".

This book aims to tell you lies about any science whenever that science contradicts conservative or theistic sacred cows. For example, it promises to bust the "myth" that Darwinian evolution is supported by overwhelming evidence, as 99% of biologists believe it is.

Very creepy indeed, but at least this book looks like it's a joke.

Then there was the PIG anti-global warming book, reassuring that the Earth has been hotter than it is now. Wow! I feel so much better!

I pity the fool that buys and believes any of this trash.

And what compendium of ignorance and stupidity would be complete without a book by Jonathan Wells?

It's the standard Intelligent Design conspiracy theories and distortions packed into one handy paperback.

You know, it did not escape my notice that we can remove one word from the titles of all these books and drastically improve them. (Hint: It's "Politically".)

Fortunately, this end cap was hidden away at the back of the science section, where there was very little room to stand in front of it. Still creepy though.

Aboutness: A Reply to Victor Reppert

2007-05-30T18:04:00.001-07:00

Victor Reppert: What is it about one physical state that makes it about another physical state? That's the question being dealt with here.

What is it about a mental state that makes it about a physical state?

Suppose you think of a tree. What makes that thought about a tree?

It seems to me that you know it is about a tree because your thought of a tree is a mental model of past experiences or potential experiences of a tree.

A tree usually has a trunk, roots, branches and leaves and so does my mental model. Of course, I can alter my model of a tree and imagine a tree, say, without roots. But what makes a mental model about an actual tree is my ability to recognize the corresponding tree if I saw it.

In general, it's difficult to model a thing that we would not recognize. The model always has at least some recognizable properties. For example, I can conceive of the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. Though I may not initially know what the kidnapper physically looks like, I do know what experiences relating to a person would lead me to recognize him as the kidnapper.

So, if we look at a computer (as [the previous commenter] suggests), we can see that the computer's manipulation of Shakespeare fails to be about the plays or the subject of the plays because 1) the computer is not dealing in a model of the subject of the plays, and 2) the computer is (presently) incapable of recognizing what the model of the plays is supposed to represent. The computer has only a stored representation of the play. It has no experiences, nor software for modeling those experiences, so it's file containing the play isn't about the subject of the play.

However, none of this precludes us creating a computer that can model its experiences, and can recognize the implications of its models. We might have to give the computer a corporeal existence (or a simulated corporeal existence) before it will understand what the plays are actually about, but it could be done.

The Map: Probability and Miracles

2007-05-26T12:54:00.001-07:00

Suppose we consider an event that is extremely unlikely. Resurrection is a good one. About 10 billion people have lived, and none have been resurrected. That means we can put the odds of being resurrected at about 1 in 10 billion.

Then someone claims that a prophet was resurrected, and that this resurrection is so improbable that it must be a case of divine intervention that validates the divine nature of the prophet.

However, the probability that someone makes up such a story in any 100 year period is close to 100% (because every century has its own bizarre fictions). Let's say that a story is so peculiar that we think the story unusual. Let's say that the story is so bizarre that we think it a one in a million shot.

Well, we will find that there's a 1 in a million chance that the miracle is made up, and a one in 10 billion chance that the story is true. That makes for a factor of 10,000 against the miracle.

If we are rational, we have to conclude that the miracle did not occur. It might have occurred, but the odds are so small that it's not worth our consideration.

In general, we conclude that any deity who tries to communicate with us using such one-time miracles is hoping we'll be irrational.

Objections

The objection to this claim is that, since Jesus is the son of God, resurrection is not improbable for him.

This is a ridiculously circular argument. Let's go back to step one:

someone claims that a prophet was resurrected, and that this resurrection is so improbable that it must be a case of divine intervention that validates the divine nature of the prophet.

It is because Jesus was resurrected that Christians believe Jesus is the son of God. The so established divine status of Jesus cannot then be the reason why we think he was resurrected in the first place.

Another objection is that my argument rules out resurrection as a divine intervention ever being persuasive. However, this objection goes nowhere as long as the deity keeps on doing the resurrections under laboratory conditions. Yes, I have difficulty believing that illusionist David Copperfield actually made the Statue of Liberty disappear. It's too improbable a miracle. And yet with enough evidence, the statistical weights can be moved, and I can be convinced that Copperfield has the powers he pretends to have. The same goes for God.

Finally, they point out that my argument doesn't disprove the Resurrection with certainty. True, but there are lots of things that are 10,000 to 1 against that we don't believe in. So why believe in the Resurrection?

Stumbling Blocks

Authority, perhaps? The Bayesian argument for the Resurrection was recently described (wrongly) by William Lane Craig, a highly respected figure in Christian circles. I don't think Christians want to call him on this atrocious attempt at statistical argumentation.

The Map: Probability and Evolution

2007-05-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

Many people, including myself, have failed to appreciate the degree to which the basic evidence for evolution undermines a theory of design. Common descent is a near fatal blow to any theory of design.

In neo-Darwinian Evolution (NDE), every life form can trace its lineage back to the very first, most primitive life forms. The tree of life has no floating branches that begin in mid air. Everything is attached to the same trunk. More generally, evolution could consist of two intertwined trees of life, but even then, there are no floating branches.

In contrast, a designed tree of life can have floating branches. Indeed, every branch could be floating, or just one, or any number in between. For example, a designer could have chosen to make man (or gazelles) a separate floating branch with no ancestors on the tree of life. Or the designer could have chosen to make each family a different branch. Or each species. Or any combination of the above. There are millions of species, so there are at least trillions of topologies of descent that one can imagine given generic design.

After Darwin made his prediction about common descent, we did not know as much about the fossil record. Nor did we know about DNA and genomes. It was possible that we might have found that humans only coincidentally look like apes, and that we might not have even had DNA. Or maybe apes would have had a triple helix instead of a double helix for their DNA.

That's not what we found. We found that all life appears to trace its line back to a common ancestor. Thousands of research projects have shown this to be the case. We share most of our genome with apes, and we even share accidental mutations, in a pattern that proves we are related by a common ancestor.

Bayes' Theorem demands that we grant NDE a huge boost factor in our confidence, and a corresponding huge suppression factor for generic design. Simply put, there's only one way to do descent with NDE, and (more than) trillions of ways to do it with generic design. And after we look at life, we find life did it like NDE. We should therefore favor NDE over generic design by factors of trillions.

Here's an analogy. I have two boxes. Each box is filled with shuffled decks of cards. In the first box are normal decks of playing cards. Each deck in the second box is special, and contains 52 copies of the Queen of Spades. You don't know which box is which, but you go to the box closest to you. You draw a deck, then turn over the top card. It's the Queen of Spades. What are the odds you're looking at the box of ordinary card decks? Well, though it's unlikely, it's still possible that you went to the box containing ordinary decks, but you're 52 times more likely to be looking at the box of special decks. You cast aside the rest of the first deck and pick up another. It too has the Queen of Spades as the top card. Again, it is possible that this is a box of ordinary decks and that you've just been unlucky. Very unlucky, but it could happen. Eventually, the probability that you went to the box of ordinary decks becomes so small that you have to conclude that you're looking at the box of special decks.

This is our situation. Not saying anything about a designer, we must say that each of the designer's design decisions is equally likely. And yet the evidence clearly shows that the generic designer would have had to make the one design (against trillions of others) that evolution would make.

(I mention a "generic designer" because advocates of Intelligent Design are loathe to say anything about the designer, despite the fact that they have no one in mind but God.)

So, the bottom line is that a generic designer is effectively ruled out by common descent.

Objections

The objection to this argument was that the assumption of equal probability for each possible descent design decision in not scientific, but theological, because what God would do is not something to which one can apply probability.

It's really rather perverse that theists first obscure God by talking about a generic designer in scientific terms, but when we try to reason about a generic designer scientifically, we are told we cannot do that without getting all theological. I was also told that the probability of the designer choosing a particular course of descent was "I don't know" and that "I don't know" cannot be plugged into an equation.

When I raised the counter-objection that probability is specifically designed to apply to unknowns, I was taken on a ride wherein the entire field of probability analysis was brought into question.

Stumbling Blocks

Were it to be shown that evolution alone could explain life and our mental faculties, the concept of objective morality would be at risk. This is confirmed by the kinds of discussions that arise when NDE is discussed in conjunction with morality. Therein, Christian theists blame the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin on evolutionary biology, as if the way we developed historically implies a murderous political philosophy.

I hate to bring it back to psychoanalysis, but theists have no answer to the probability argument. They are simply ignoring it because it is inconvenient.

The Map: Objectivity

2007-05-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

If you've read the posts so far, you've seen that, for the theist, everything centers on morality. People have to objectively deserve a punishment or reward. This inevitably leads us to ask what is required to establish something as objective.

There are several definitions of the term objective. Objective can mean inter-subjective, i.e., that people can come to some agreement about a convention. However, what we are looking for is a meaning of objective that roughly equates to "true independent of our present beliefs about it." This appears as a desire to know "The Truth" about the world.

We are handicapped because everything that comes through our minds is filtered by our experiences which are subjective. We have no way to know whether or not we are brains in a vat that dream the world as we see it. So "The Truth" as children like to think of it is a non-starter. There is no way to know a truth beyond experience because experience is our window on truth.

However, we are intuitively aware of a distinction between objective and subjective. And we can devise rigorous tests for objectivity and subjectivity.

My claim is that objectivity is a word we give to properties of things that appear to be distinct from ourselves. A good example is taste in food. I like chocolate. We believe chocolate exists objectively, and that it contains fats and sugars. However, my liking chocolate is about my interaction with chocolate, not about the chocolate itself. We would not say that chocolate objectively contains doctor(logic)-likability. We could say that, but then we would obliterate all subjectivity by hiding it in objective likability properties, and that starts to look silly from certain perspective.

So what I am saying is that a subjective fact about a thing is a fact about my interaction with that thing, not about the thing itself. In other words, if you did not know anything about me, you would not be able to fix that fact by looking at the thing itself. Not knowing anything about doctor(logic), you could not fix the doctor(logic)-likability of Doris Day.

The challenge is that it is difficult for me, doctor(logic), to isolate whether a property of a thing is in the thing itself versus in my interaction with the thing. I hear the sounds of a Mozart symphony, and it sounds good. I am objectively sensitive to the sound of the music, but the aesthetic goodness of the sound is subjective.

I proposed two tests for objective properties, one of which is a limited version of the other. In the case of the Mozart symphony, it's possible to sense the sound independent of knowing that it is a Mozart symphony. However, it is not possible to sense the aesthetic goodness without hearing the the whole piece. I cannot sense the goodness alone, but I can sense the sound alone. If I could sense the goodness alone, I would have good reason to believe that the goodness was part of Mozart's symphony, and not simply my reaction to it.

The key to this test is blinding oneself to all but one property of a thing. If we can do this, then we have good reason to believe that this property is part of the thing and not a part of our interaction with the thing.

This isn't proof that goodness is subjective, but it is the only kind of distinction we can make. Were we to assume that the aesthetic goodness of a symphony is out there, but that some poor bastards are blind to it, then we could say the same of any property we can perceive. That would mean that if you like red wine more than white, you could argue that red wine was objectively better, and people who did not like it more were crippled in some way. And presumably, people who prefer white wine ought to seek surgery or counseling for their defect.

Returning to my test, we can try this on all sorts of categories that are normally regarded as subjective and objective and see how the test works out:

Subjective / Objective
Musical taste / Musical sound
Gastronomic taste / Food chemistry
Art taste / Geometry, color, texture
Cultural taste / History, political facts, traditions
Moral taste, justice / Actions, decisions, consequences, law

In these cases, we can see that it is not possible to isolate good art, good food, good culture, good morality, or good music from a thing. Yet we can isolate the objective properties of things in a fairly straightforward way.

For example, I can devise a way to identify the sugar in a food without tasting the food in its totality. I can even make a machine that will detect its sweetness. And yet I will never know whether it is good food until I taste it as a whole.

I described my two tests in detail here.

Now, theists could make (but haven't made) the objection that there are objective emergent properties of wholes. For example, they might claim that the goodness of a Mozart symphony emerges from the whole, and that even a complete analysis of beats and times and tones and structure would not reveal the holistic property of the piece. As a holistic property, this property cannot be isolated from the other properties that are relevant to that whole.

While this objection seems reasonable to me, it doesn't really help. We knew from the start that it was possible for some properties to be objective even if we could not make that distinction. The objection fails because, were we to accept that any perceived attribute of the whole is some objective holistic property, then again we would utterly destroy the subjective/objective distinction.

Objections

Alas, there are no serious objections that I have seen.

Theists will say that if there's no objective morality, then eating babies is okay, but since doctor(logic) does not subjectively believe eating babies is okay, eating babies must be objectively wrong. Their arguments are that bad. That's why they insist that moral relativists like myself should never use the terms ought or should.

Of course, they are begging the question to the max. An inherent feature of moral oughts is that individuals will claim one ought to do a thing, and act to enforce or encourage such oughts. This is the phenomenon we are studying. The question we are considering is whether moral oughts are subjective or objective, whether we possess oughts due to accidents of our nature or because we perceive a reality of oughts external to ourselves. It is irrational to then turn around and claim that the phenomenon does not exist unless moral oughts are objective and external.

Stumbling Blocks

Once again, it all comes down to morality. If there is no moral reality, how can we be trusted to do cultural good instead of evil?

The Map: Free Will and Determinism

2007-05-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

Free Will and Determinism

We experience free will as

Our having the ability to recognize choices before us,
Predict the outcomes of those choices,
Choose according to our preferences, and
Have our choice make an apparent difference.

One thing that we don't experience with free will is our having analyzed all prior causes of our predicament and all prior causes of our preferences. So, clearly, free will has nothing to do with determinism.

Objections

Theists argue that we only have free will if we could make a different choice given identical initial conditions. They will admit that some determinism is required to make reasoned decisions, but they argue that total determinism would preclude a person making a different choice in the same situation.

I have never seen a good argument to back this up, and I don't think that any serious philosopher could support this view. Hume obliterated this old argument centuries ago, and it's embarrassing for humanity that we should still have to waste our time on the argument today.

Just because we would always make the same decision given the same initial conditions doesn't imply that our decisions don't matter. They most certainly do. If we didn't decide the way we decide, then the future would be different. The future is different because we decide the way we do. The theistic argument is like saying that the gravitational pull of Jupiter makes no difference because the gravity is deterministic.

We don't even need to assume that the mind is material. If my decision depends on timeless factors (e.g., syllogisms) , then my decision is still deterministic. I still had to make the same decision every time.

The situation is worse still. If my decision is not determined by the past, then it isn't determined at all. It's random. Indeed, that is the case in which our decisions don't matter and are not meaningful. It's ironic that theists are arguing for a form of free will in which our identities do not matter. And all of this just so that we can by punished for our identities later.

Stumbling Blocks

Theists cannot concede any of these points because, were they to accept them, divine justice most obviously breaks down. For theists, such a conclusion would be absurd in the existentialist sense of the term. People would no longer deserve to be punished or rewarded, and their theology would be pointless.

But the theist's position is inconsistent on two counts, though they may be less obvious.

First, they claim that "free" is a third category after "random" and "determined." This defies logic and the definitions of determined and random.

Second, and more subtly, the kind of freedom they seek robs us of the responsibility that would deserve punishment or reward.

The Map: Determinism and Randomness

2007-05-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

Determinism and Randomness

An event is fully determined when every facet of the final state is determined by the initial state. The undetermined facets of the final state are random (a logical complement of determined).

There's a difference between apparent randomness and true or fundamental randomness. Apparent randomness arises when we simply have not found the elements of the initial state that determine the final state. True randomness arises when those undetermined facets of the final state are not determined by anything at all.

(Note: whether or not these distinctions are meaningful is questionable, but I'll get to that in my post on Meaning.)

Objections

Theists object that a random event would by uncaused, and that a thing that is not caused by anything else can only be caused by itself. This "self-causation" is absurd, they claim. This argument hinges on the principle that everything has a cause (The Principle of Sufficient Reason or PSR). Yet, this principle is invalid and unjustifiable vis-a-vis causality. There have been attempts to justify it, but the PSR is generally considered to be unpersuasive by modern philosophers.

The reason that it is defunct with respect to causality is that, if some truly random events occur, nothing breaks. Sacrifice the PSR and you won't notice.

The foundational problem with the PSR is that, for it to make sense, you have to stretch the terms 'exist' or 'cause' well beyond their limits. I write about this on my blog here.

A fine illustration of the futility of the PSR comes from Quantum Mechanics. If radioactive decays have a truly random element to them, life (and physics) goes on. As far as I can tell, the only things threatened by abandonment of the PSR are a bunch of untestable philosophical claims.

Conceiving of true randomness (if it exists) is quite a psychic shock. I remember that I rejected it at one time, though I rejected it for aesthetic reasons. However, the shock value of fundamental randomness now makes it a rather beautiful thing to my mind: a harmless idea upon which so few can look without fear.

Stumbling Blocks

Either Christians won't dare consider that the PSR might not hold in every case, or they have considered it and don't like the consequences.

If the PSR breaks down, if determinism and randomness are truly complementary, then there can be no justice as theists perceive it. Persons do not metaphysically deserve punishment or reward because their decisions were either fixed when God created the universe, or were mistakes beyond their control.

A breakdown of the PSR represents a threat to moral reality for theists.

The Map

2007-05-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

I've generally had a good time debating theists on the blogs. It has been frustrating at times, but it has also been educational. My online discussions have given me new philosophical insights, and helped me map out the beliefs of theists. In this post, I'm going to attempt to draw this map as I see it. Of course, there will be many theists who will disclaim some of these beliefs, but I only write of what I have encountered.

The people with whom I have debated have not been the Bible-thumpers who can do nothing but quote verses from scripture. All of my debating counterparts have shown at least some rationality, often making the next anticipated move in a debate. Yet all of them seem to stumble somewhere.

In my opinion, none of them can state their foundational assumptions. They have a constellation of beliefs, but many of those beliefs go unquestioned. Theists take many beliefs at face value as self-evident facts. That is, they fail to consider the true implications of giving up certain assumptions, and so they fail to see that those assumptions are not necessary.

Generally, my opponents have had a hard time with definitions. I'm not saying definitions are easy to keep straight, but philosophy is pointless unless you can clearly define your terms and meanings. Consequently, it is common for theists to beg the question and claim that, say, free will is defined so as to be ruled out by determinism. Yet, free will, as we experience it, has nothing to do with determinism. If "experienced free will" is not what they are talking about, then they should at least state this clearly.

I had planned to present the entire map in one post, but I find that it's too daunting a task for a single post. I'll post the points on the map one at a time, and, if I can, I'll post a diagram connecting them all.

Thus far, the topics I want to discuss are:

Determinism and the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Free Will
Probability Theory: Miracles
Probability Theory: Superstition
Probability Theory: Evolution
Theory of Meaning
Arguments from Rationality
The Problem of Evil
Ontology
Moral Progress

Scientific Atheist

2007-05-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.

Scientific Atheist

92%

Militant Atheist

67%

Spiritual Atheist

58%

Agnostic

42%

Angry Atheist

25%

Apathetic Atheist

17%

Theist

17%

What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Treating the Dead

2007-05-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

A fascinating article in Newsweek discusses the resuscitation of the clinically dead:

"After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed.

...

"It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

Superstition

2007-05-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

I've been debating over at Thinking Christian for a long time. I was surprised to learn that the Christians there are very superstitious. It's not what I expected.

Some people confuse superstitious belief with belief in the non-material. There's a big difference. Superstition is an alleged way of knowing, not a category about which stuff is known. For example, I can have a superstitious belief about the physical location of missing wedding ring. Obviously, the location of the ring isn't remotely non-material in nature. What makes my belief superstitious is the array of subjective data that I use to reach my conclusion. If I believe that the ring is located beneath an old tire because I had a dream that a pot of gold was hidden under a rubber tree, then my belief is superstitious.

Superstition relies on meaningful coincidence. The number 13 is said to be unlucky. If I win $13 on a slot machine, I anticipate something bad happening. If later that day I lose my wedding ring, I'll blame the loss on winning $13. Yet, had I later found a $100 bill lying on the street, I would not correlate that discovery with having won $13, because the number 13 is associated with bad luck and not good luck. In other words, I cherry-pick significant events to confirm my superstition, so my superstitious belief cannot be discredited through this methodology. Had I won $14, I would be upset about losing the ring, but would just say it was bad luck and think nothing of a connection between 14 and the loss. Superstition is an atrocious way to come to insight about anything.

Superstition seems to be much more powerful when it demands action on our part. We can't really help waking up on Friday the 13th, so most people just go about their day as normal. However, superstition holds more sway over us when we are decision-making. I consider myself very rational and relatively impervious to superstitious thinking, but even I feel a psychological tug when I do only 13 reps in my workout. My gut prefers to do 12 or 14.

Superstition becomes stronger still when ritual is involved. There is anxiety about not performing the ritual, and there is poor methodology in confirming the effect. I suspect that we all have the mental circuitry for this kind of thinking, but not all of us activate those circuits. Ritual supercharges these circuits.

The bottom line is that superstitious belief is a psychological trap, and ritualistic superstitious thinking is a psychological steel trap. Once you fall prey to this kind of thinking, you are guaranteed to have personal, subjective confirmation of your belief. If you believe that prayer will have an effect, it will. You will always find something you can attribute to having said the prayer.

None of this sounds remotely problematic to the theists over at Thinking Christian. I found this surprising. I honestly expected them to be above this sort of self-delusion. I can see how having a superstitious relationship with God would deeply affect their thinking. They are unable to put on the "No-God Glasses" as Julia Sweeney calls them. They cannot objectively consider questions about theism without betting on the number 13.

I wonder whether knowing of the existence of this trap is enough to entice a person to give up superstition.

The Living Roof

2007-05-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

The California Academy of Sciences is building a new facility in San Francisco. Not not just green metaphorically. The roof will be alive with plant life. I've always thought buildings should be put together this way. And not just because I like the Teletubbies.

See more photos at News.com.

Thank Teddy

2007-04-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

I just read this paragraph on the Campus Crusade for Christ call-for-prayer:

In times like these we desperately need God - we need God to meet with us, to comfort us, and to give us perspective.

It occurred to me that this works just as well with a teddy bear substituted for God. Better, in fact.

I certainly wouldn't ridicule someone for looking to their teddy bear for comfort. Teddy bears are fine comforters. However, I think it would be foolish and irresponsible to go around pretending that teddy bears were real persons. It would be crazy to believe that when we imagine Teddy saying something, he must actually be talking to us. Or that we shouldn't offend Teddy lest he use his magic against us.

Virginia Tech

2007-04-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

I have put posting about this, but I guess it's time to say a few words.

The VT attackwas a terrible event, and my heart goes out to the friends and families of the victims, and to anyone deeply affected by the tragedy.

From what I have read, it appears that the attacker may have been paranoid schizophrenic. Though there were mistakes that were made, it is understandable that the attacker was able to get away with this violence. No one really understood the threat he represented. Any responsible person who had known what Cho was going to do would surely have stopped him.

It's natural for us to look for some course of action that would prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. The gun lobby and the gun control lobby have both been milking this story as a PR vehicle. The authoritarians want to ban video games, books and movies. The supernaturalists want to blame it on materialism. Early commentators blamed it on muslims or remarked on the value the tragedy would have to terrorists. All very bad form in my opinion.

The way to prevent these things is to look for signs of mental illness, and treat those signs as an extremely serious matter. We can improve security procedures somewhat, but we're not going to give up our freedoms and our way of life in the process.

Accidental Irreducible Complexity

2007-04-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

Suppose there is a primitive human settlement on the edge of a dense forest. The forest is very difficult to traverse, especially with equipment. However, the villagers need the fruits of the forest, so they create a pathway through the forest. Eventually, the pathway becomes a road that reaches the other side of the forest. One day, by chance, a villager uses the food trail to take some digging tools to the other side of the forest, where he digs for minerals. There, thanks to his tools, he finds an immensely valuable mineral. Soon, the forest road is used as much for mineral transport as for food. Finally, the village learns to plant nutritious crops in the flatlands near the village, and stops collecting low nutrition foods in the forest.

Now, look at the final state. The villagers are using the road only to transport minerals and tools for digging. Yet, if the road had not existed, they could never have transported the tools to make the initial discovery. It's just too improbable that the village folk would create a road to nowhere at massive expense, transport their equipment along this trail, dig, and find minerals. Since the villagers don't feed in the forest, and have forgotten that they did, this system is apparently irreducibly complex (IC). Not knowing this history, it appears that the villagers would have had to know about the minerals before they built the road and dug for them in the right spot.

By co-opting components of a system that serve alternate functions (nutrition, not just mining), one significantly reduces the improbability involved versus having all the components appear at once. You get the illusion of foresight.

And yet, intelligent design advocates like Behe and Dembski continue to deny that IC systems can evolve through incremental steps. This is willful blindness (or worse). Their claims have been thoroughly refuted, but they continue to make them.

Christianity Hijacked My Axioms!

2007-04-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

Suppose we make a rational argument for some conclusion, C. The argument contains a set of premises, P1, P2, P3...PN.

In any argument relevant to our rational faculties, one might be tempted to claim that, since P1-PN contain no explicit guarantee of rational capacity, one ought not have confidence in the conclusion of the argument, because we cannot trust our faculties to have followed the argument in the first place.

At first, such a critique may seem clever, but it's actually total nonsense.

Implicit in every rational argument is an initial premise, P0, which says that we assume that we are rational and that the problem under study is amenable to rational analysis. That is, P0 assumes axioms of rationality, including logical consistency, induction, and the axiomatic nature of our experiences.

Without this implicit premise, no rational arguments would work.

There's a simple way of stating this result. We cannot have a rational argument for the axioms of rationality. Any such argument would rely on the axioms it was trying to prove.

That means that any supposed rational argument that states that God guarantees our rationality (and a world where such faculties are applicable) is circular. In order to find such a rational argument persuasive, I would first have to assume that I am rational in order to prove that I am rational.

Implicitly, a naturalistic argument about origins incorporates P0. If a theist later says "ah, but your argument must make the additional assumption that the naturalistic process made us rational," then the theist would be slipping on a logical banana skin. The original argument, like all rational arguments, assumed we were rational in step zero, so it costs us nothing to reassert this assumption later.

Likewise, any rational argument we make that refers to God also incorporates P0. That means we are immune from atheists asking questions like "how do you know God isn't just making you think you're rational?"

This doesn't mean we cannot critique a rational argument on the grounds that it contradicts the rational faculties upon which it relies. However, in order to use this approach, we have to show that P1-PN truly contradict P0. We have to show that the premises that follow P0 make rationality totally impossible. Accusing an argument of making rationality improbable is not adequate to invalidate an argument on these grounds.

Christianity falsely pretends that the axioms of reason are rationally deduced from the axioms of Christianity. Christians would have us believe that the assumption of their theology grants us rationality, and creates a lawful universe in which science and rationality are possible. This is hijacking, plain and simple. If we did not assume rationality (which includes inductive inference), then the assumption of God wouldn't guarantee anything at all (not even itself).

Controls Are Our Friends

2007-04-16T18:00:00.001-07:00

Before we begin scientific or philosophical analysis, we start out with intuitions and preconceived ideas.

However, we can be convinced that our prior beliefs were wrong and unjustified by using blind testing methods. Basically, we devise a test in which we separate the truth of our beliefs from how we feel about those beliefs. In other words, if we are interested in the truth, and eschew self-delusion, experimental controls are our friends.

Well, prayer and religious reflections are anti-controls. They are not just unscientific, they are anti-scientific. By focusing on particular outcomes, or outcomes that have particular meaning to us, we bias all our observations to a preconceived conclusion. We deliberately provide safe haven for any delusions we may have.

Suppose I pray for a good day. Any random event that occurs gets run through a filter. Is it neutral? If yes, then ignore the event. If the event is particularly good, then make a mental note. If the event is particularly bad, refocus the terms of our experiment and say that we were praying for something we shouldn't have prayed for. Or we say that God intended us to learn some other lesson. The result is that our experiences reinforce our superstitious beliefs, no matter what those beliefs happen to be. For example, a black cat crossing your path is said to be lucky in Britain, but said to be unlucky in the United States.

Superstition is a strange attractor indeed. And a very lucrative one for all the crackpot organizations out there that promote superstitions.

Of course, I cannot prove that one ought not delude oneself. I just feel strongly that one ought not do so. If you agree, then you ought to give up your superstitions, and quit pretending that prayers are answered, or that your magic spells are effective, or that your magic is better than placebo. At least not until you've performed some suitably scientific testing to verify your belief.

The Powerful Implications of Common Descent.

2007-04-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

There's an extremely simple and powerful reason why neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) is overwhelmingly confirmed by the experimental data.

Suppose I have two decks of cards.

The first deck is sorted in order of rank and suit (two of clubs, two of spades,...).

The other deck is composed of random cards, with duplicates allowed. This second deck could have been produced in any possible way. It could have been arranged by someone who likes twos, or be left over from last night's poker game, or express the first 52 digits of pi using aces as ones. There are lots of possible ways the deck could be arranged.

At random, I place one of the two decks in front of you. You turn over the first card. It's the two of clubs. What are the odds that I placed the first, sorted deck before you?

The answer (using Bayesian statistics) is about 98%. And it's simple to see why. The prior probability we assigned to the arrangement of the unknown deck was spread out over countless possibilities. Meanwhile, the prior probability of the sorted deck was focused on only one. The "sorted deck theory" was bold and made a firm prediction, and was suitably rewarded.

There is a strong analogy between this and the ID vs. NDE debate. The sorted deck is analogous to common descent. The random deck is analogous to ID.

Here's why.

NDE essentially requires common descent. There might be more than one line of common descent to the simplest life, but it is unlikely that there would be more than a handful. Yet, in any case, every life form must trace its lineage back to the simplest life.

In the case of design, this isn't true. There's no reason why a super-intelligent designer/manufacturer could not have designed moles using non-DNA technology, and without inheriting from any ancestor species. Indeed the same is true for every species. Every species could have been uniquely designed. This means that there are billions of possible permutations for separate lines of descent of species.

Indeed, it was once believed that a designer made all the different kinds of creatures as their own special invention. This is a plausible position given that humans often design systems from scratch, and not every system we build was descended by variation from a prior design on a particular technological platform.

So, when we apply Bayesian statistics to this we find that generic ID is effectively falsified, and NDE is overwhelmingly confirmed. DNA evidence is that all life can trace its way back to the simplest life. ID likes to suppose that a designer intervened at each step, but they have already lost the war.

Simply put, there's no reason in generic ID why the designer would, out of billions (or a googol) of possible lines of descent, happen to build life in the one way necessary for NDE.

Of course, ID could theoretically improve its position. If ID can refine its theory so as to explain why the designer chose common descent, then it could narrow the odds.

The analogy in the card experiment would go like this. Suppose I change my theory about the random deck to one that proposes that the non-sorted deck was produced by a person who loved twos. Every one of the 52 cards is a two. In that case, turning over the two of clubs no longer gives us 98% confidence that we're looking at the sorted deck. Rather, we now think that there's only an 80% chance that we're looking at the sorted deck.

However, in creating a competitive theory, I have been forced to make a detailed prediction. This is where ID falls on its face like the fraud that it is. ID advocates generally refuse to make substantive predictions, and if they do make predictions, they don't follow from premises. It's not that ID is inherently unscientific, but rather that ID as it is today refuses to state a theory and place positive bets on the outcomes of experiments. In particular, until ID explains why common descent is observed, they're already at at least a billion to one probability disadvantage over NDE.

Why Determinism and Free Will are Disconnected (mostly)

2007-04-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

The following was part of an argument I presented over at Thinking Christian.

Intuition tells us that, from our perspective, we affect future events by examining the choices of action before us, simulating the outcome of each action, choosing the preferred outcome, and executing the chosen action. That's decision-making.

Furthermore, it is intuitive that making a decision often leads to different results than making no decision.

That is, from our perspective, our decisions (or lack thereof) affect the future. That's what intuition tells us. Intution cannot tell us that the universe is non-mechanistic because our intuition is not sensitive to that factor.

If the universe is mechanistic, our decisions still affect the future as seen from our perspective. Our experiences are totally insensitive to the question of, say, whether or not our actions could have been predicted a million years ago.

Suppose that I have weighed my dinner options against my preferences, and decided to eat a hamburger at Wendy's. Suppose that I then learn (never mind how) that the universe is totally mechanistic. Does this mean that I no longer have to act to obtain my Wendy's hamburger? If I do nothing, will the burger come to me as if by magic? Of course not. My decisions still affect the future from my perspective, even if they are not affected from an omniscient point of view. I still have to decide which dinner option I prefer, and execute my tasks in order to get my dinner. If I choose to do nothing, then, presumably, I was predestined to do nothing. If I choose to cross the street and go to Burger King, then I was destined to go to Burger King. The fact always remains that I choose my destiny.

The same would be true if I had magically found out that the universe was not mechanistic. I would act in exactly the same way.

So, from a human perspective, the mechanistic nature of the universe makes not a jot of difference to will, choice and action.

This is why the mythical association between free will and a lack of determinism is just a confusion. If anything, will and rationality rely on determinism.

If one defines free will to be equivalent to a lack of determinism, then one is begging the question. One would be defining free will to be supernatural or perhaps even illogical. Determinism and randomness are logical complements, and there's no third choice which logically delivers the kind of options that supernaturalists seek.

Closet Atheists...

2007-04-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting excerpt from a Newsweek article entitled Is God Real?

As Jews and Christians commemorate Passover and Holy Week in the coming days, the ancient debate over whether God exists goes on. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 91 percent report they believe in God, with 82 percent identifying themselves as Christians. Yet half those surveyed say they "personally know" an atheist, and 47 percent believe the country is more accepting of atheism than it has been in the past—which suggests there may be closet atheists who do not believe but do not wish to say so to a pollster. Other cultural indicators are unmistakable: books making the case against religious belief are selling briskly, evidence that many Americans are entertaining arguments against God and what these authors see as the destructive effects of faith.

Transvision 2007

2007-03-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Transvision will be in Chicago this year. And guess who'll be there... William Shatner!

Register now!

Keynote presentations by:

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Acclaimed longevity scientist
Raymond Kurzweil, Inventor, Author, Futurist
William Shatner, Emmy award winning actor

Conference Chair

Charlie Kam, Master of Ceremonies

Presentations by:
Nick Bostrom, Ph.D.
Jose Cordiero
James Hughes, Ph.D.
Michael LaTorra
Max More
Giulio Prisco
Martine Rothblatt
Kenji Williams
Natasha Vita-More
(more speakers to be announced)

Here are just some of the topics we'll be discussing:

Day One: Inner space: Transforming Ourselves

Longevity, Life Extension, Nanotech, Nanomedicine, Bionics, Biotech, SENS, Cryonics

Day Two: Meta space: Transforming Humanity

Environment, Global Warming, Sustainable Housing, Alternative Energy, AI, Robotics, Virtual Reality

Day Three: Outer space: Beyond the Planet

Future Humans, Colonizing Outer space, Space Tourism, Future Civilizations

Ontology Schmontology

2007-03-09T22:21:00.001-08:00

Suppose I see a 2-D lifelike image of an apple. This is a pattern of experience.

Now, it could be a lifelike photo, or I could be looking at the real thing. What is the real thing? A real apple would be 2-8 inches across, solid, but soft, three-dimensional, and be filled with organic compounds, show signs of organic growth, and so on.

We would agree that the apple is "real" if the 2-D pattern we first observe is part of the extended 3-D pattern of phenomena I just described.

Well, this is what "real" means. We don't require apples possess invisible properties in invisible dimensions. The reality of the apple is fixed in our experience. If we believe the proposition "this apple is real," then we have an expectation that the apple is 3-D, solid, organic, etc.

Thus, when we say that "the apple that is sitting on the table is real," we are using a code that means that our experiences will be in accordance with our conventional definition of an apple. The apple will participate in our experiences in expected ways - it won't walk away, spontaneously disappear, it will rot if we go on vacation for a week, and so on.

Unfortunately, the situation isn't even this simple. If I find that the apple has no seeds in it, I will be faced with a choice. I can declare that the apple is not a "real apple" (since I have ever seen a seedless apple) or I can extend my definition of "real apple" to include seedless apples. Through a lifetime of experience, our definitions of "real stuff" have been so defined, often in a subjective way. (People disagree as to whether certain species of banana are actually bananas at all. "That's not a real banana," they say.)

Sooo...

I am saying that "real apple" is a mnemonic for a pattern of experiences we have associated with apples. It is not the case that an apple is only real if it has some "unexperiencable" property. No. Any apple that our experience tells us is real is real by definition.

This means that, 99.9% of the time, substance theorists and bundle theorists have the very same intuitive sense of reality. Galaxies, big bangs, hamburgers, and politicians are all equally real to us both.

However, there's a strong (and quite natural) psychological desire to say that reality is more than this. There are several reasons why.

The list of patterns of experience that constitute a "real object" is far more extensive than we can think of at once. If I were to ask you to list all of the attributes of cars, and define the boundaries of what is and is not a real car, you would be at it for a whole week. Throughout our lives we constantly evaluate whether X is a real car, and if X is sufficiently car-like, it gets incorporated into the definition of "real car" even if X is fairly bizarre (e.g., lowriders).
We are often in a position in which we are fooled about real stuff, and another person isn't. We can be swindled. We can be confused in such a way that another person is better informed than we are about what is real. It is natural to feel that, since there are cases in which other people are better informed than ourselves, there must be some frame of reference in which the definitions of what is real are absolute and observers are impartial.

So, the everyday use of the term "real" has an intuitive conception of existence in some magic, absolute sense where we cannot be fooled.

This is the cognitive equivalent of believing in an absolute rest frame. We're so used to thinking about things being at rest in everyday activity, that we are compelled to believe in a frame which really is at rest, even if we're not sure how to find it or define it. Special Relativity showed that this intuition was unjustified, if not wrong.

For me, the "real apple" is an intersubjective definition of a pattern of phenomena. If experience demonstrates these phenomena, then the apple is real. If it doesn't, either we refine our definition or the apple isn't real.

For substance theorists, if the apple is real, it exists in a fashion that has nothing whatsoever to do with any experience they will ever have. I think this is psychologically natural, but ultimately an inconsistency because reality isn't defined in terms of stuff we don't experience.

Crazy Talk About Veterans Affairs

2007-03-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

Newsweek's Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey do well to shine some light on President Bush's handling of the Walter Reed scandal:

What a difference two years make. Back in 2004, John Kerry repeatedly raised the issue of poor care for veterans through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Bush’s response was dismissive. In their last televised debate, Kerry said Bush “hasn’t fully funded the VA and the VA hospital [sic] is having trouble and veterans are complaining.”

Bush’s response? “Of course we’re meeting our obligation to our veterans, and the veterans know that. We’re expanding veterans’ health care throughout the country. We’re aligning facilities where the veterans live now. Veterans are getting very good health care under my administration, and they will continue to do so during the next four years.”

Unfortunately, apparently too spineless to paint the picture in the starkest terms, the reporters end on this note:

The issue of veterans’ care is one that Bush cannot take for granted, as he once did in 2004. Compared to the complexities of the Libby trial, this is a simple debate the White House cannot afford to lose.

They can win?!!

These journalists just don't seem to get it. Bush was warned about the problems with veteran's care long before 2004, but failed to act until something dramatic happened. He's already lost this one. Or at least he should have if the press were doing their jobs.

Bush has been asleep at the switch since day one, when he was warned by outgoing Clinton officials that the number one threat to U.S. security was Al Qaeda. Did he listen? No. He went off trashing international treaties and building half-baked ABM systems. And we all know what happened next.

Global warming? New Orleans levees? Iraq pre-war intelligence? Iraq post-war planning?

Bush has proven his incompetence and arrogance time after time. He never listens to advice from experts. He's an ideologue who thinks that if he prays to God, everything will magically fall into place. He's a very dangerous man who is responsible for the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people around the world.

These reporters think he can win the debate. Well, perhaps, with their help, he can.

Which Super Villain am I?

2007-03-04T07:43:00.000-08:00

You are Apocalypse

You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

Apocalypse		87%
Lex Luthor		86%
Magneto		85%
Dr. Doom		76%
Green Goblin		72%
Poison Ivy		66%
Mystique		60%
Mr. Freeze		56%
The Joker		54%
Dark Phoenix		54%
Catwoman		52%
Juggernaut		48%
Venom		48%
Riddler		43%
Kingpin		41%
Two-Face		40%

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain am I?" quiz...

Spirituality and Art

2007-02-25T05:56:00.000-08:00

Decades on, I find I now appreciate art more than at any time since I was a young child. From about age 10, I think I deliberately severed my connections with things artistic. Partly it was because my mother would compliment me (as all mothers compliment their children) by saying "You should be an artist!" which I regarded as a threat to my plans to become a "nuclear physicist-scientist-astronaut".

My thinking about this connection began when I saw the movie Shaolin Soccer, which I called "a very spiritual movie."

Traveling in atheist circles, one has to be careful how one uses the word spiritual. Even when one is careful, one can still be misconstrued as talking about 'woo' and hocus pocus. The commonly suggested alternative, transcendence, isn't the right word.

There are many ways one can transcend one's self. One can learn a new skill, a new language, or a new craft. One can try to get a sense of what is it like to be someone else, and to feel what they feel. Transcendent experiences alter the boundary of the self or aid in seeing that boundary.

However, there is a significant distinction to be made between transcendence and the feelings which surround it.

Take 10 seconds to think about each the following ideas:

Think about learning a language.
Think about languages you love to hear.
Think about how much your sphere of possibility would expand when you become fluent in a new language.
Think about being able to speak any language with fluency.

Learning a new language (1) is an act of transcendence as I have defined it. I can only speak for myself, but when I think of learning a new language, I think of hard work, and my embarrassment at making mistakes. Not feelings I like to dwell upon.

However, the other three ideas stimulate pleasurable feelings. When I think of Italian, I think of romance. Ciao Bella! (Thanks, Eddie Izzard!) If I were fluent in Italian, Italian culture would be far less alien to me, and a visit to Italy would be as comfortable as a visit to London. And if I could speak any language, I could connect with many more people at a much deeper level.

I consider my feelings towards the latter three thoughts to be spiritual. They are feelings about the results of transcendence of my self.

When I think about acts of transcendence, as opposed to the results, my brain becomes bogged-down in technical analysis, and that obscures the ultimate pleasure of extending the boundaries of my self.

So where does art come in?

First, art creates images of my transcended self in an abstract way that subtracts out the specifics. It's a way of looking at the results of transcendence without looking at the technical details.

It's difficult to visualize myself speaking Italian. I don't know much about the language, and don't know much about Italian culture. I have had a taste of that culture, and I can associate certain images and symbols with it, but I cannot be more specific until I have gone through the process of learning the language. However, I can be motivated to do the hard work of transcendence by focusing on the symbols and archetypal images that I associate with the results of learning the language. Photos like this one perhaps.

I found a recent example of abstraction in a sculpture by Alexander Archipenko called Struggle (right).

The sculpture seems to depict a struggle, and this was apparent right away. But when I try to go from the abstract to the specific, I can't unambiguously see what each part of the sculpture represents. I can't tell which arm belongs to which person, nor can I tell precisely where the heads of the combatants are, if they are even people at all.

This work is interesting to me, but not because the concept of a Struggle resonates with me spiritually. It is interesting to me because it tells me something about myself and my perceptions. It tells me something about how I perceive the world, and that tells me more about myself.

I find that, to appreciate art, I need to look at works and ask what the work says about transcendence. Not every work is going to appeal in this way. Some works just look like rubbish to me. I think that's normal and this doesn't say anything bad about me or the work or the artist. We each have unique selves, and unique identities, so we should expect that transcendence means something different to everyone.

Art can also be the agent of transcendence. For art to transform me, I have to be introspective about my negative reactions.

Corset, a photo by Rahim the Photographer, has several things that I found initially disturbing. I've never much liked tattoos and piercings, and often regarded them as attempts to get attention or fit in with a clique. So, at first, the idea of a corset formed of ribbon threaded through piercings struck me as a neurosis taken too far. But then I stopped reacting with fear, and started to reflect on my reaction to the image. I tried to see her beauty as she would see it.

I generally see my physical and mental self as unified. An imposition on my self is an imposition whether it's mental or physical. I can't read her mind, but the model in Corset seems to have a strong mind-body dualism. It's almost as if she sees her physical and mental selves as independent. She might even be alienated from her physical form. At the same time, she obviously sees herself as beautiful, and regards her body as a work of art.

I don't claim to fully understand the model, but her photograph opened my mind to a part of the world I would otherwise have shut out or dismissed (body modification). It tells me something about myself, and about how my circumstances warp my view of reality. It redefines the boundary of my self by recalibrating my perceptions. I also create a transcendent bridge between my own thoughts and the mindset of the subject.

Conclusion
I think that spiritual feelings are feelings about the results of transcendence. Such feelings often require me to visualize transcendence while obscuring the out the technical details, and this abstraction is something art can do very effectively. Finally, when I open myself to it, art can directly change my perceptions.

I hope to refine these ideas in the coming months. They're still a little... abstract... at the moment.

Demolition of the Willing

2007-02-24T07:14:00.000-08:00

This is the title of Christopher Dickey's new piece in Newsweek:

The backlash brought on by what we’ve seen since then runs so deep today that even reasonable policies become political poison once they’re branded pro-American. Thus bitter memories of lies and insults undermine legitimate efforts to restrain the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. They discredit efforts to encourage democracy, inevitably branded by dictators as an American import.

The Iraq war was lost before it began because the diplomatic and psychological policies on which it was formulated were incompetent and suicidal.

Blog Slowdown

2007-02-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, my blogging rate has slowed. Partly it's because the points I've been making in my recent debates are ones I've already covered multiple times. Still, it's probably worth my time to restate my arguments more clearly and concisely.

Objectivism: The Religion of Libertarianism

2007-02-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

I've spent some time debating with libertarians online, and I think I've taken those debates as far as I was interested in taking them. Like communism, libertarianism seems to rely on an unrealistic model of human behavior. We're not all rational all the time, and most of us are not interested in striving to be perfect consumers. Most of us have better things to do with our time and little gray cells. That's why libertarianism is unworkable.

I think this observation leads us to the true connection between Ayn Rand's objectivism and libertarianism. Objectivism demands that its adherents be ideally rational and be more perfect consumers. The goal of objectivism is to instill in its adherents personal traits that happen to be necessary for them to live under a libertarian political system.

Best. Fortune Cookies. Ever.

2007-02-13T08:52:00.000-08:00

Pancake Day

2007-02-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

Words from me to a Valentine's Day skeptic:

Valentine's day is like pancake day. And who doesn't like pancakes?

If you know you're going to be eating pancakes tomorrow, well... make room for pancakes!

Stuff Happens

2007-02-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

You would be surprised how profound people think this statement is. I mean, where is the profundity in saying that something is going to happen without being specific about what is going to happen?

Yet that's exactly what people do when they claim something is true without the possibility of observing a contradiction or evidence to the contrary.

Yes, we're talking about the classic case of the goodness of God. "God is good," say the theists. And when you ask them what experiences would be evidence that God isn't good, they shrug. Their claims can be translated as "stuff will happen, and no matter what happens, proposition P is true."

This means that the truth of P has no implication for what will happen or what will be experienced. If P were not about the world of happenings and experience, this might be acceptable. For example, 1+1=2 could be regarded as such a proposition whose truth is independent of happenings. I wouldn't regard it so, but some might. If a person said that 1+1=2 isn't about what happens in the world (excluding the world of mental computation), then they would have a reasonable case.

However, when theists say God is good, they are talking about the actions of God, i.e., about happenings. How can "God is good" be a proposition about happenings yet have no implication for what happens? In that case ~P would mean "stuff will happens, and no matter what happens, P is false."

So every experience we have, mental or physical, confirms ~P as much as P. Needless to say, P isn't profound at all. It is self-delusional to even regard P as a proposition, let alone claim it true.

Ayn Rand

2007-01-28T05:50:00.000-08:00

After doing a little reading about Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, I've come to the conclusion that her position on ethics is less convincing that Peter Singer's. And I didn't particularly like Singer's position.

Rand decries moral relativism, and tries to establish the objectivity of her positions by staking out the prerequisites for values. Her values lead her to advocate a libertarian political position.

Non-living matter has no values. Invulnerable, unchangeable robots have no values. From this she concludes that all values are about survival of mortal beings. Rand notes that rationality is vital to the survival of human beings, in the same way that teeth and claws are vital to the survival of lions. So, Rand builds an philosophy that demands constant use of one's rational faculties to better one's life:

The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values, and one's only guide to action. It means one's total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focusin all issues, in all choices, in all of one's waking hours.

The use of force in place of reason is regarded as contrary to human nature, and a regression to subhuman forms of behavior. Rand goes further than this to say that:

[Objectivist ethics] holds that the rational interests of men do not clash - that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

She states that:

The basic political principle of Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man - or group, or society, or government, - has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man.

Like Singer, Rand tries to take you from one step to another, each step sounding somewhat morally agreeable, until you reach a point at which you're somewhat agreeing with her final conclusion. The problems with this are two-fold. First, this technique is not even remotely objective. Second, she doesn't carry it off particularly well because she is more blatantly failing to defeat the is-ought problem along the way.

Rand's first fault is at step one where she connects survival and value. That life is a prerequisite for values does not imply that values must promote survival. Neither is this the case in actual fact. Many people think they ought to die at some point, and many people think there are things worth dying for. I quite suspect that there are many people who think humanity should die out rather than change into cyborgs or some other posthuman form.

While it is true that rationality forms the teeth and claws of humankind, it's not obvious that non-violence is always the best approach to survival. Though violence poses an increasing danger to human survival, it's not obvious to me that it always has been the case.

Finally, the idea that if we were all rational, our interests would not clash is a little far-fetched. We can interpret this with flexibility, but only by weakening the claim to a ridiculous degree.

This leads me to the high degree of ambiguity in the interpretation of her positions.

If a company is polluting my air, has physical force been initiated against me? Can I respond with physical force? Suppose that, due to my family's poor circumstances and due to an unfair labor market imposed by powerful corporations, my health deteriorates. Are the corporations initiating physical force against me? If this is the case, then we may be justified in anything from armed revolution to state regulation and management. Ambiguous.

If you and I rationally conclude we should compromise on our values to avoid retaliation of the other party, does that mean that our rational interests do not clash? If it does, then Rand's statement applies equally well to instrumentalism and moral relativism. Again, this is ambiguous to the point of being useless.

Due to all this ambiguity, I think that the libertarianism that Rand promoted wouldn't follow from her premises even if those premises were true.

There are some attractive elements to Rand's philosophy, but they don't follow from her basic principles. It's hard to criticize Rand's ideals about non-violence and her rejection of mysticism. However, in the end, I found I was disappointed with the lack of clarity and rigor in Rand's system. Her Aristotlean starting point is defunct and obsolete, and I think that if Rand didn't boot out mysticism a priori, her philosophy wouldn't have strayed far from that of Thomas Aquinas.

The best part about reading Rand was that it led me once again to David Hume. Every time I read about Hume, I am more impressed. If for no other reason than the early date at which Hume came to his conclusions, I have decided that Hume is my favorite philosopher. Not that I don't still love A. J. Ayer.

Saddam and the 10-year-old

2007-01-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

A 10-year-old child in Texas hung himself while acting out the execution of Saddam Hussein. I guess I'll take this as my cue to weigh in on this issue.

The day of Saddam's execution, someone made a casual comment about the impending event. I don't recall what the comment was, nor who made it. I just remember thinking how perverse it was to be chatting about a killing as if it were the next episode of a sitcom.

I also heard that there were plans to prosecute the guy who recorded the killing on his mobile phone. As if killings done in our name should be done in private.

I'm sure that if Saddam had harmed anyone I loved, I would have wanted him dead. However, he didn't harm anyone I know, and I feel dirtier and less proud since he was executed in my name. I have to wonder what sort of justice it is that brings collateral damage to me and more so to a 10-year-old boy in Texas. Not any kind of justice I recognize. Revenge would be a better name for it.

The premise of the justice system should be that it promotes better social outcomes, and killing people doesn't actually do that. It's not about whether Saddam deserved to be killed, but whether the result of his execution will be beneficial. It's far from obvious that it will be.

Why don't we draw and quarter criminals anymore? Or burn women at the stake? Are the crimes of today lesser than those of the past?

No. We're just more civilized these days. The cruelty of these executions was once thought necessary to distinguish the trauma of the penalty from the trauma of everyday life. The problem is that these so-called "punishments" simply prolong our barbarity by desensitizing us to violence. It was right to put an end to barbaric practices in the past, and it is right to do so again.

Inferred Qualities May Be Objective But Not Absolute

2007-01-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

Franklin Mason asked a good question in response to my last post on objectivity:

Why can't one hold that knowledge of evil - something itself perfectly objective - is always an inference from those other qualities? Why oppose "inferred quality" with "objective quality"?

In order to answer this, I think we need to be more precise. An inferred quality is inferred using some sort of procedure. For example, the quality of a square of a number is inferred by multiplying the number with itself. However, there may be an infinite number of procedures of inference (e.g., raising X to the power Y, adding 5 to X, associating X apples with Y dollars, etc.), and no procedure is fundamentally privileged.

Now, given a specification for a procedure, I think we can show that the inferred quantity or quality is objective. Indeed, computers actually do this. However, the choice of procedure is not absolute.

If you infer from an act that the act was good, and I infer that the act was evil, we are simply using different procedures. That procedure may be rule-based or some very complex function of brain chemistry. Both procedures could be shown to give objective answers to specific questions. However, we have no "meta-procedure" to show that one procedure is fundamentally privileged over the other. We cannot say that my rule-based morality is better than your gut morality because we have no privileged meta-procedure.

For example, if I say that formal morality beats intuition, and you say the opposite, how can we show that one answer is objectively better than the other? Wouldn't that require a meta-meta-procedure of inference which is equally arbitrary?

For another example, I think one could conceivably be sufficiently precise in describing a particular Christian morality that any act can be objectively categorized as good or evil within that moral system. However, why should we choose that Christian morality in the first place? Why not Muslim morality? Clearly, we will need some meta-procedure that prefers Christian morality over Muslim morality. However, any meta-procedure that privileges Christian morality is not privileged unless we assume a meta-meta-procedure. But the meta-meta-procedure isn't privileged, and so on, ad infinitum.

In conclusion, a procedure for inference can be objectively executable, but it cannot be absolutely selectable. This is why morality, being inferred rather than intrinsic, cannot be absolute.

Another Test for Objectivity [Preliminary]

2007-01-02T21:18:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I defined subjectivity:

An attribute of a thing is subjective when it cannot be determined that the attribute is a feature of the thing itself rather than a consequence of our mental faculties.

I then proposed a test for objectivity that requires a high-precision external comparator. I still think that test is an excellent one, but there is a simpler one.

How do I know if an attribute of a thing that I detect is really in that thing, or whether it is being subjectively painted on by my faculties? If I smell a flower, how do I know that the scent is an attribute of the flower and not just my subjective impressions of the other attributes of the flower (e.g., it's shape, mass, color, sweetness, etc.)?

[The following is inspired from a gigantic thread over at Thinking Christian.]

Suppose that I have two baskets, one containing pungent cheese, the other containing flowers. Both are covered in cloth.

If our sense of smell were merely a subjective reaction to the other attributes of cheese and flowers, then we ought not be able to sniff out the contents of each basket without knowing the other attributes of the basket contents.

Of course, we can predict which basket is which just from the scent of each basket. I can effectively hide all the other attributes of a thing but scent, and still identify the hidden object.

By this method, we find that color is objective, too. Instead of baskets, let's use boxes with frosted glass on top. Thanks to the glass, you can isolate the color from the other attributes of the object. If you know that we are dealing with a yellow moon and a green clover, you can predict which is in which box by the color seen through the frosted glass. You can test that your sense of color predicts the owner of the attribute.

However, the equivalent procedure for aesthetics is quite different. We don't sense a beautiful painting without seeing the painting first. Rather, we see the painting, and then we know whether it is beautiful to us.

The same is true for morality. Can we "smell a rat" even when an evil act is cloaked from us? Nope. We only feel moral distaste when the other attributes of the moral act are revealed to us. Only when the con man's ploy is exposed in detail do we react with disgust. But, if morality were like scent, shouldn't we sense the disgust in the surrounding "ether," then predict that a morally disgusting act was taking place?

Now, imagine what our sense of smell would be like if it behaved the same way as our morality. We would be unable to predict the contents of the baskets by smell. We would only know the smell of the contents when they were otherwise revealed (visually, by touch, by verbal description, etc).

Indeed, there's a fun parallel with classifications of moral acts and classifications of odors. Suppose again that sense of smell is like sense of morality. If instead of revealing the contents of the basket, our colleague simply tells us that the basket contains a fresh-picked flower of some unspecified species, we would immediately smell a floral aroma. Just by having been provided information about the contents of the basket! Even if our colleague has a dead rat in the basket, we would still smell a floral scent. Would we then insist that smell was objectively in the cheese and the flower (as opposed to our reaction to their other properties)? I don't think we would.

We never get to test our sense of morality by sensing moral disgust, then predicting what the act was that made us feel that way. It's always the other way around. Morality is always a reaction, subsequent to all the other facts of the case. It's not the case that we sense evil, then predict the crime. It only happens in reverse order.

To summarize:

I propose that an attribute be objective when there is symmetry between (i) my detecting a thing and predicting the corresponding attribute, and (ii) my detecting the attribute and predicting the thing that owns that attribute.

This requires that we be able to isolate the test attribute of a thing from the other attributes of that thing.

Defining Subjective and Objective

2006-12-27T19:56:00.000-08:00

How does one define the objective and the subjective? It's not as easy as it sounds.

If we aren't careful, we might find that everything is one or the other, and the distinction will mean nothing. If everything is subjective or everything is objective, what good is the distinction? What are we going to use the distinction for? It would be a pointless exercise.

What we are looking for is a distinction under which some things are objective and everything else is subjective.

First, let's admit that everything we know is known through our own faculties of reason and sensation, both of which are known to be imperfect. If susceptibility to such imperfection defines the subjective, then everything would be subjective (so we rule out that definition).

Second, let's also admit that the subjective nature of our individual faculties might be a matter of objective fact. So, if the distinction is to be made, I think we ought to be able to make it whether or not every fact in the universe could be objectively known.

I think that these two admissions lead me to propose the following definition:

An attribute of a thing is subjective when it cannot be determined that the attribute is a feature of the thing itself rather than a consequence of our mental faculties.

Note that, under this definition, if we don't have evidence of the faculty-independence of an attribute, we regard that attribute as subjective.

So, what constitutes evidence of faculty-independence?

I think that evidence of faculty-independence comes in the form of high-precision, alternative comparators. To explain, let's look at why physical mass is regarded as objective.

Technically, humans aren't sensitive to mass, but to force. So we're asking, is "how heavy a thing feels" just a subjective perception? In absolute terms, weight is subjective - a small child will find a 100 pound weight immovable, but an average adult won't. However, what we're really asking is whether relative weight is a measure of something about the weighed objects, or whether it is just about how we are perceiving them.

The way to test this is to find something other than personal sensation of force to use as a comparator. A balance scale, for example. Based on how comparatively heavy two objects feel, you can pretty accurately predict which way the scale will tip when the scale is used as a comparator. You can also do the reverse, and, based on the scale, predict which will feel heavier. You can do this independently of the visual size, shape or composition of the objects.

I think a lack of an acceptable external comparator is what makes a field subjective. If I have two rooms, one containing an ugly person, and another containing a beautiful person, there's no 'beauty-meter' I can poke through the keyholes to tell me which room is which. If I could build such a device, it could work only by emulating me (e.g., through training against my tastes).

Likewise, there's no justice machine that tells us whether one act is more just than another. Any such machine would have to be trained or conditioned against our tastes (e.g., through the use of juries and legal precedent).

Can another person act as an external comparator? I think the answer is "no," and that precision is the vital clue here.

In objective fields, human-trained machines can outperform their trainers. For example, based on my experience with some 1-pound weights, I can devise a machine (such as a balance scale) that can compare two masses weighing hundreds of pounds. More importantly, this machine can be far more sensitive than me when it comes to weighing very small masses. So, I can use the machine to extrapolate beyond my senses and get higher precision, and verify that this sensitivity is real. I can weigh all the grains of rice in a sack, and verify that the heaviest 25% of the grains weigh noticeably more than the lightest 25% of the grains. I can verify that the machine is better than I am at weighing things.

In contrast, human-trained machines can't outperform their trainers in subjective fields. I don't think that a committee or a technical analysis is a more precise judge of beauty or gastronomic taste than the "best" human judge. Likewise, I don't think that the justice system or a religious authority has demonstrated higher moral precision than a good individual human. I think this is a clue that our inventions in these spaces are mere approximations to our subjective feelings.

Similarly, in a subjective field, I cannot verify that another person can work better as external comparator. Suppose you wish to use your friend Plato as an external comparator for the beauty of women. Suppose that 90% of the time, Plato agrees with you. When Plato disagrees, how will you settle the argument? There's no mechanism you can use to verify that Plato is right or wrong.

The same goes for morality. No other person can act as a verifiable external comparator. If God is taken to be an external comparator, then not only must you have faith in his existence, but you must also have (double) faith that he is an accurate external comparator because you certainly can't verify that his is right and you are wrong.

Based on my definition, we are forced to conclude that morality and aesthetics are subjective, whereas mathematics and physics are objective.

Can we find an alternate definition that will hold morality objective, but maintain the subjective-objective distinction? Well, I can't rule out that possibility, but I can't think of a viable alternative. This is because I think that one can't claim objectivity of an attribute if it's observer-dependent, so the tests I have outlined appear to be minimum requirements of objectivity.

Science and Religion

2006-12-13T19:59:00.000-08:00

There has been a flurry of blog posts lately about the conflict between science and religion. Thanks to the indisputable success of science, the Christian bloggers argue that there's no conflict. In fact, they argue that Christianity was the source of science, and they quote two authors in particular, Rodney Stark and Stanley Jaki, to back up their claims. If these authors are to be believed, the Dark Ages are a myth, and we wouldn't even have science if it weren't for Christianity.

Fortunately, Richard Carrier sets us straight with a detailed and authoritative explanation of how Christianity impeded science. I highly recommend Carrier's wonderful debunking of some truly devious revisionisms. (HT: Thinking Christian)

Still, Carrier doesn't argue that Christianity is inherently anti-science. Rather, he argues that it impeded science because it established an authoritarian power structure that put a damper on non-conformist thought (non-conformism being a vital ingredient of scientific thinking).

Revelation and Authority
Suppose you make a claim that's not verifiable by logical proof or by empirical testing. Such a claim would be revealed knowledge, and by definition, it isn't publicly testable. This means that the status of revealed knowledge is established by authority.

Don't secularists accept knowledge by authority all the time? Yes, but usually when that authority is itself testable. We take a doctor's diagnosis based on her authority, but we would be loathe to do so if our doctor had had no training, no testing, and if the syllabus she followed had not been validated by medical testing.

Religious authorities are quite different. There's no way to test that religious authorities know what they are talking about. Obviously, we can check that a lowly priest is teaching what the Catholic church says he ought to, but how do we know that the Catholic church leadership knows what it's talking about? By going to the authority of their teachers? The buck of religious knowledge stops at some guy who has no evidence for his claims, and no way for the public to verify what he says is true. If religious authorities were doctors, they would be the worst kind of fraudulent quacks.

How do religions get started?
A prophet comes along and says something like "The highest good is to worship the creator." How do we know he's right? We can't because his claim is not testable. So, if the prophet gains a major following, he does so for reasons other than verification of his claims. Maybe he is followed because he's a charismatic leader or a seasoned warrior, and while these may be rational reasons to make alliances with his clan, these skills aren't reasons to believe his claims. That is, he has authority in verifiable areas (e.g., sword combat), but no authority that will justify his claims.

Nevertheless, people flock to his religion simply because other people are already following it. This is natural for humans. Most of us don't pay much attention to the medical certification process, but we figure that everyone else goes to see doctors, so there must be something worthwhile to medical treatment. Of course, in the case of medicine, we have established formal oversight to ensure that doctors aren't quacks, and to ensure that the medical system isn't just founded on herd mentality. However, in the case of religion, there's no oversight because there's no possible mechanism for oversight.

Eventually and unreasonably, the prophet's followers establish a religious institution with political and economic powers.

One of the conflicts with science arises when the prophet makes claims that he thinks are unverifiable, but which later turn out to be scientific (and false). I can imagine that in the old days, this sort of thing happened all the time. "This volcano is a god, and if you place a piece of pumice at your door, your house will be safe!" shouted the prophet. As the homes of the villagers burned down, leaving nothing but ash and lumps of blackened pumice where the doorsteps used to be, the volcano god and his prophet went up in smoke.

Sometimes, though, the prophet's claims remained untestable for a long period of time. For example, the people who wrote the Old Testament probably thought that geocentrism was either obvious or unverifiable. When scientists showed up hundreds of years later and said the Earth wasn't at the center of the universe, they were effectively challenging the authority which established the religion, and religious authority had to fight back.

Thus, religion tends to damp scientific investigation because religion is inherently authoritarian. When state and religion are mixed, non-conformist ideas (like scientific ones) get clobbered, even if those ideas are verified. Galileo's case clearly demonstrates this phenomenon. Though many Christians will protest that Galileo's imprisonment was primarily political, the church still forced Galileo to recant his (true) heliocentric ideas, and declared heliocentrism a heresy.

However, religion still conflicts with science, even when it remains separate from the state. Imagine that the church in Galileo's time was not also the state. What would the church have been teaching? It would have taught its followers to reject Galileo's science in favor of church authority. This is anti-scientific in the sense that it aims to discredit science. This isn't just a thought experiment. Modern churches convince their flocks that the established science of Darwinian evolution is a myth. That's anti-science, my friends.

Always in Conflict?
I spent a while trying to figure out a way to have a science-friendly religion, but I wasn't particularly successful.

We could require state secularism, i.e., strict separation of church and state, and we could require that the religion not make claims that are verifiable. That way, no scientific conclusion will ever impact religious views, and the religious authorities will have no reason to spread dissent against scientific methods or conclusions. This certainly helps, but I think that it doesn't go far enough.

A scientific mind will not easily accept propositions that are established solely on the basis of authority. For example, what is a scientist to make of the claim that "God is good despite the fact that there's nothing we could ever observe that would change our minds"? To a scientist, this is a thoroughly unreasonable proposition. The scientific mind is filled with doubt, not faith. Yet religious faith trains minds to accept claims based on authority and without evidence.

If claims based solely on authority without evidence are useless when verification is available, why should such claims suddenly become effective just because we can no longer verify that they are wrong?

A Reconsideration of Atran

2006-12-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

In a recent post, I seized upon some criticism of Scott Atran at the Beyond Belief conference. I've been reading more writing by Scott Atran, and he really brings a lot of excellent empirical information to the table. This excerpt from a recent reply on Edge was fascinating:

Religious worlds with supernaturals who manage our existential anxieties — such as sudden catastrophe, loneliness, injustice and misery – are minimally counterintuitive worlds. An experimental setup for this idea is to consider a 3 x 4 matrix of core domains (folkphysics, folkbiology, folkpsychology) by ontological categories (person, animal, plant, substance). By changing one and only one intuitive relationship among the 12 cells you then generate what Pascal Boyer calls a "minimal counterintuition." For example, switching the cell ( − folkpsychology, substance) to ( + folkpsychology, substance) yields a thinking talisman, whereas switching ( + folkpsychology, person) to (− folkpsychology, person) yields an unthinking zombie. But changing two or more cells simultaneously usually leads only to confusion. Our experiments show that minimally counterintuitive beliefs are optimal for retaining stories in human memory (mains results have been replicated by teams of independent researchers, see for example articles in the most recent issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture).

Atran goes on to show, for example, that interpretations of the Ten Commandments are pretty resilient to translation. Serial paraphrasing of "Thou shalt not kill" ends up with a message that faithfully expresses the original principle. Not all passages have this property. This means that the meaning and interpretation of a passage by religionists is not generally literal, but is some sort of invariant inspiration that follows from that passage. Well worth the read.

Atran seems to rub everyone the wrong way because he doesn't seem to get from his deep understanding of sociology to any strategy for secularization. Instead, he just talks about how tough a problem it is to deal with an irrational world. Atran has a point, but I think he underestimates the value of public criticism of religion. I think it has a powerful liberal effect when people lose their fear of atheism through familiarity with its concepts and adherents.

Supernatural Law is Natural

2006-12-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

A supernatural thing is a thing not governed by law. I expect most supernaturalists will immediately object that I have omitted the word "natural" before the word law, arguing that supernatural causes may be governed by unnatural laws.

Here, I'm going to dispense with this confusion. There's really no natural/non-natural distinction when it comes to law. I can't think of any non-natural laws. A thing (or aspect of a thing) is natural if and only if that thing is governed by law.

Mathematics is lawful and non-physical, yet we don't consider mathematics to be supernatural.

Electromagnetic phenomena like lightning were once considered unnatural phenomena, but electromagnetism became natural when it was found to obey laws. So, the whole idea of "supernatural law" is quite ridiculous. A supernatural law would simply be reclassified as a natural law in the same way lightning is now interpreted as a natural phenomenon.

This means that the space of supernatural stuff contains nothing governed by laws of any kind. No matter what we observe about a supernatural system or precursor, we cannot say anything about its future state.

Have I proven that there are no supernatural (uncaused) events? Not at all. There may well be such events. It's just that, if we knew that an event were supernatural, its supernatural nature would be all we could ever know about it. Of course, we can't actually know that an event is supernatural. At best you might show that you cannot find a law that would account for the event. Hence, the assertion that an event is supernatural is the assertion that not only do we not know the cause of an event, but we cannot know anything about its cause, not even in principle. It's ignorance piled on top of ignorance.

Beyond Belief Video

2006-12-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

Video recordings of the Beyond Belief conference can be seen at Edge.org, and they're a lot of fun.

I haven't had time to watch them all, but the most interesting presentation I've seen so far was given by V.S. Ramachandran. Ramachandran's description of a patient whose disconnected brain hemispheres have opposing views on God's existence is priceless:

So here is a human being whose left hemisphere is an atheist, and whose right hemisphere believes in God, and this finding should have sent a tsunami through the theological community, but barely produced a ripple. Because it raises all sorts of profound theological questions. If this person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere...

We also get to hear Richard Dawkins relate a story about the former editor of New Scientist who was asked what philosophy it was he brought to the magazine which resulted in the publication's great success under the editor's tenure. The editor responded, "our philosophy is that science is interesting, and anyone who thinks it isn't can f*ck off!"

As a bonus, we get to see an equal-opportunity mauling of Stuart Hameroff by physicists, philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Hameroff goes down in flames for perpetuating a silly and nonsensical theory about quantum consciousness.

Love it!

Dick Cheney's Historical Documents

2006-12-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

I'm well into Season Two of The Six Million Dollar Man, and I've just realized that this show is where the Vice President is getting his intelligence information. These episodes are his "historical documents."

Of course, to Cheney's way of thinking, the diplomatic and humane methods employed by the OSI constitute appeasement of terrorists.

BTW, the cool pop artwork is by Francois Coorens.

Beyond Belief Discussion

2006-12-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

Edge.org presents a post-conference discussion among participants in November's Beyond Belief conference.

Anthropologist Scott Atran takes Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to task for what he sees as their naïve anti-religious views. However, I have to agree with the rebuttals. Though Atran manages to provide quote fodder for theist bloggers, he's not making a lot of sense. The issue here is dogmatism. People need to get used to having their hare-brained dogmas publicly criticized and ridiculed.

Sam Harris writes:

Were the regimes of Stalin and Hitler actually the products of too much intellectual honesty? Was an overweening demand for good evidence and coherent argument really what built the Soviet gulag and the Nazi crematoria? Are the Swedes — a majority of whom appear to be atheists (poll results range from 45-80%) — gearing up for the next great atrocity? It is amazing to see someone like Atran defend religious dogmatism by pointing out that the consequences of political and racist dogmatism have also been terrible. One of the most conspicuous problems with communism and fascism is that they are so similar to religions. These political ideologies are systems of brittle, divisive, and dehumanizing dogmatism. And they regularly give rise to personality cults which evince all the perverse features of religious hero-worship. I invite Atran to produce a single example of a society that has suffered because its members became too reasonable — that is, too open to evidence and argument, too critical of dogma, etc.

The Real Force Behind the Mass Murders of History

2006-11-24T21:06:00.000-08:00

A friend suggested I comment on a recent column by Dinesh D'Souza claiming that atheism, rather than religion, is responsible for the greatest mass murders of history. These sort of accusations pop up now and again, and they're a sign that either the accuser is playing games, or has a very limited understanding of the issues.

Just to put things in perspective for those who have never heard of D'Souza, he is one of the neoconservatives who thought invading Iraq was a pretty cool idea back in 2003. He also recently thought that a democratic Iraq would be a beacon of inspiration to other nations in the region. This isn't directly relevant to D'Souza's column, but it does establish the level of wingnuttery we're dealing with here.

At the conclusion of D'Souza's column about the evils of atheism, he writes:

It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence.

Now, hang on to your butts... this statement isn't completely untrue. It's just misleading. It's not a connection between totalitarianism and religious belief. The problem is with organized religion.

There are two kinds of dictatorships: mandated and coerced.

Coerced dictatorships emerge by overpowering the people. For instance, the Russian Civil War was lost by the liberals, leaving a radical, authoritarian, fear-mongering cabal in power. The people made their stand and were defeated militarily. In the decades that followed, millions would die at the hands of a paranoid police state. In such cases, it makes little difference whether or not the people are critical thinkers and humanitarians.

The claim that religious affiliation of the dictator would have prevented the holocausts of the 20th century is utterly preposterous. Dictators are not nice guys, and mass murder goes with the territory. That's how they get to be dictators.

When they're theistic, the dictators see themselves as God's representative on Earth, and they'll see their self-preservation as a holy cause.

Though Hitler's actions were motivated neither by Christianity nor atheism, Hitler was a Christian. The evidence is as plain as day. I quite expect that if you had asked Hitler whether God approved of his actions, he would have answered in the affirmative. It's perfectly natural when you think about it. We all create God in our own image. Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, put it this way:

The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense and war between Christ and Marx.

Did Saddam think Allah was on his side? I quite expect so.

So, religion won't defend us by giving us better dictators (although it might be more likely to give us less technologically sophisticated ones).

But what of the dictatorships that emerge with the consent or mandate of the people? What could compel people to willingly sacrifice their civil rights and participate in dark crimes of the state?

Fear and mob mentality. When fear strikes, people naturally seek the security of their tribe. When this happens, people naturally suspect any dissenter of treachery. The needs of the group outweigh the needs of any individual, be they man, woman or child.

Hitler was a power-hungry maniac who found something that worked: social manipulation through propaganda. The German people were encouraged to think (or, rather, not think) like a mob and be proud Christians in the process. Dissent was punished. Fear, dogma, propaganda, and ideology overruled the people's humanity, critical thinking and reason. Hermann Göring, infamous Nazi, explained why they it worked:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

And he might be right. Perhaps, it is in the nature of every state, even the democratic ones, to be vulnerable in this way.

Then again, maybe there's a hope that our citizenry might one day be more than faint-hearted lemmings. Maybe they will have the courage to put their fear aside, stick to their principles of rationality, and question what they are told. Such courage would be no certain defense against totalitarianism, but it would protect us from mandated dictatorship. From the next Hitler.

Will religion help or hurt?

In the Spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry, Dr. Lawrence Britt cataloged the identifying traits of fascist governments. A few passages stand out:

Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

One cannot miss the parallels between fascism and organized religion. Just substitute tribalism for nationalism. The more reactionary the religion, the more fascist it looks.

The central mission of religious institutions is indoctrination to dogma. Their aim is to provide a ready tribe, and to condemn dissenting views. Religions are monuments to the ideal that there are unquestionable moral authorities, and that systems based on blind obedience are not just to be tolerated but revered. Indeed, most churches of organized religion claim that a dictator runs the universe for his pleasure and our pain.

So, how exactly is a microcosm of fascism going to teach us to eschew fascism? Of course, it will do no such thing.

Could religion's authoritarian influences be neutralized by their espousal of humanism and non-violence? This is wishful thinking. Religions actively support our wars (whether just or not), and right-wing religious groups have no problem with torture of prisoners (after all, the prisoners are obviously terrorists, or they would never have been arrested). The most prominent American religions always seek punishment, including the death penalty, even when alternatives like forgiveness might result in better social outcomes.

These are not the values of liberal democracy. They are the values of totalitarian states, like Iran. Democracy has only advanced by building a wall between church and state.

Thus, contrary to D'Souza's conclusion, most organized religions groom their flocks for dictators, whether those tyrants be atheist or religious.

Emergence and Reductionism

2006-11-23T05:46:00.000-08:00

Stuart Kauffman has written a piece on emergence and reductionism for the Edge eZine. Edge is a very cool magazine, and I recommend picking up a free email subscription if you don't have one.

Kauffman claims that reductionism is out of steam, and suggests that emergence provides the answers that reductionism cannot. Kauffman cites three examples, the first of which is the origin of life.

Clearly none of the theories above is adequate. But one gets the firm sense that science is moving in on possible routes to the origin of life on earth. If some combination of the metabolism, polymer autocatalysis and lipid first view can be formulated and tested in a new "Systems Chemistry", we may find the answers we seek.

Suppose we do. It will be a scientific triumph of course. But if such self reproducing and, via heritable variations, evolving systems are formed, are they ontologically emergent with respect to physics? I believe the answer is yes.

Kauffman backs up his claim by arguing that natural selection can run on multiple physical platforms, as long as those platforms are self reproducing and have heritable variations. Intuitively, he seems to be on to something. The problem is that if we take emergence to mean the emergence of higher level properties from lower level ones, then metals are an ontologically emergent feature of atomic physics. And orbits are an emergent feature of gravitional attraction (orbits can occur under electromagnetic attraction).

Kauffman tries to distinguish emergence from reductionistic pictures by looking to see if the emergent feature can possibly be shown to emerge algorithmically from low-level physics. He says:

Note that while the physicist might deduce that a specific set of molecules was self reproducing, and had heritable variations and instantiated natural selection, one cannot deduce natural selection from the specific physics of any specific case(s), or even this universe, alone.

I find this rather baffling. Does Kauffman mean that you can't see evolution in a single organism? Does he mean that a molecular model that shows evolutionary processes is current beyond tractability? If we apply this rule to chemistry, we will find that water does not reduce to H₂O because molecular models of fountains and waterfalls are presently intractable. I can't imagine a definition of emergence that Kauffman could using that wouldn't dispel the notion of reduction altogether.

Kauffman's second example is agency. Of meaning and value for agents he says:

They too are ontologically emergent. We have a natural place for value in a world of fact, for the world is not just fact: agents act on the world and actions are not just facts, for the action itself is a subset of the causal consequences of what occurs during an act, and that relevant subset cannot be deduced from physics.

Kauffman really ought to add the word "today" to then end of that sentence. This is a tired old poem about how meaning and value seem like more than facts, so they can't also be made of facts. Sort of like the way diamonds seem like so much more than charcoal, so diamonds and charcoal can't be the same stuff.

Indeed, the diamond example illustrates just how reductionism is often misunderstood. Diamonds are not charcoal. That's not what reductionism says. Reductionism is the idea that diamonds and charcoal are different forms or arrangements of the same component, carbon. Failure to appreciate this leads to what Daniel Dennett calls greedy reductionism - the idea that reductionism equates different configurations of the low-level components. Greedy reductionists hold that since dishwashers and paintings are the "same stuff," there is no such property as 'dishwasherness' or 'paintingness', and that it is irrational to treat them any differently. Clearly, this is not the case. We don't create galleries of fine dishwashers, nor do we dry our dishes with masterworks because the utility of each class of object is different. That is, stuff has different value to us humans depending on its configuration.

On the issue of consciousness, Kauffman argues that the mind cannot be a machine if it does not use algorithms. Devising a fairly mundane mechanical arrangement to prevent his computer from being upset by an unfortunate cable pull, Kauffman says:

So I invented a solution. I jammed the cord into one of the cracks and pulled it tight so that my family would not be able to pull the computer off the table. Now it seems to me that there is no way to turn this Herculian mental performance into an algorithm. How would one bound the features of the situation finitely? How would one even list the features of the table in a denumerably infinite list? One cannot. Thus it seems to me that no algorithm was performed. As a broader case, we are all familiar with struggling to formulate a problem. Do you remotely think that your struggle is an effective "mechanical" or algorithmic procedure? I do not.

There are several misconceptions captured in this single paragraph. First of all, we don't need an exhaustive definition of table in order to process information about a table. We only need a description that has as much precision as we need for the task at hand. We don't care whether tables are secretly alive, or are naturally occurring plant formations. All we care about is their local utility. Yes, we can examine tables in seemingly endless detail, but that's not really relevant to the solution we're talking about.

Second, an algorithm that solves a problem doesn't need to prove it deductively. Evolution and natural selection are brilliant examples of this. Genetic programming solves problems without necessarily reaching a single, right answer. The proof of its rightness is in the tasting. The same is true of Kauffman's computer cabling contrivance. Not only is it not a unique solution to the general problem, but there are seemingly an infinite continuity of ways he could have positioned the cable at a molecular level. We might think that Kauffman is saying that statistical algorithms aren't algorithms at all, or that the presence of statistical algorithms renders reduction invalid. Yet, again, such a claim would invalidate all reductionist claims.

Reductionism
All of this means we need to agree on definitions of what constitutes reduction and what doesn't. After all, we might find we agree once we synchronize our terminology.

Steven Weinberg's definition is that, in reductionism, "explanatory arrows always point downward." What does this mean? Well, an explanation requires a predictive model. The model needs to contain a number of components that doesn't exceed the possible number of observations we can make. (If it were to do so, it would degenerate into a restatement of observations as they happen.) Inevitably, a model will propose that there are a limited number of components or component families that have properties that predict (and thereby) explain the observation. In this way, we learn that high-level observations can be explained in terms of lower level entities that ought to have observable effects.

Emergence
Is emergence the opposite of reductionism? Not necessarily. Diamond emerges from carbon, but that's not a counterexample to reductionism. As Kauffman suggests, there's also the notion epistemological emergence. Waterfalls are emergent, but we don't doubt that waterfalls are explained by, and reduce to, oxygen dihydride. We simply think that the computations necessary to simulate a waterfall are beyond our reach.

Kauffman also speaks of ontological emergence - the idea that emergent stuff is not reducible to other stuff, not even in principle. Thus, an ontological emergence of agency would mean that, in principle, we are prevented from constructing a predictive component model that would produce agency.

One of my problems with ontological emergence is that we don't get an explanatory arrow at all. If agency isn't explained by the stuff that appear to be necessary for it, then what explains agency? Are we to believe that agency is predicted by what it produces? That decisions get made, and decisions need agency, therefore, decisions are more fundamental than the agency which produced them?

This whole picture is quite bizarre. We are presented with some high-level concepts like life, agency, and consciousness, each of which are defined by their temporal function, i.e., their ability to do a certain kind of work in transforming a system at time zero to a new system at time t. We're then asked to accept that life, agency and consciousness are to be explained by a deeper need for things to grow, be decided, or be aware. As if a fundamental law of awareness predicts that there should be a mechanism by which things may be aware. This is very poetic, but does anyone really find this explanatory?

Think about it. Is my agency explained by my need to use that agency to decide what to eat for breakfast? Is my conscious caused by my future need to be self-aware? Are present and developing faculties to be explained by their future function? The only thing I see emerging here is the delusion that present observations are explained merely by their future (as yet unknown) consequences. The emergent physics that makes me choose to eat Shredded Wheat for breakfast is explained by my resultant choice of eating it.

Conclusion
Kauffman's article expresses his discontent with reductionism, but it doesn't do anything more. Most importantly, it fails to establish any rigorous definition of emergence or how emergence delivers explanatory power. Just how does the explanatory arrow point from the future to the present without being either nonsensical or a triviality?

Predictive Explanations: Are they necessary or sufficient?

2006-11-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

In my debate about explanation at Thinking Christian, someone offered this link in criticism of my assertion that explanation requires prediction.

Carl Hempel developed a theory (the deductive-nomological, or DN model) in which the laws and boundary conditions of the explanans (the thing that does the explaining) must deductively imply the explanandum (the thing being explained). A slightly modified version of this is the inductive-statistical (IS) model which uses statistical generalizations instead of universal generalizations.

My model of explanation is very similar to the DN/IS model. The main difference is that, unlike the IS model, mine doesn't require that the regularity assert a high probability statistical generalization. Whereas Hempel's model is based on a parallel with logical deduction, my model is based on differentiation from trivial restatement of the explanandum.

I think there's an intuitive reason why Hempel's requirement that the probability be high can be relaxed. If you're going to claim probability of an outcome given certain initial conditions, it only makes sense that such a claim would be tested statistically over a sample size greater than one. This means that we can devise an experiment that statistically amplifies the variation of the probability distribution away from uniformity. Even if a law says that a child is 1% more likely to inherit a genetic ailment given the presence of the disease in a sibling, that slight variation can be amplified by doing a statistical survey of a large number of families. Not only can small variations in probability distributions be magnified by larger sample sizes, the mere statement of a probability distribution implicitly asserts that such a test is anticipated. This leads naturally into Bas van Fraassen's Constructive empiricism because we can take either a frequentist approach or a Bayesian approach to statements of probability.

After Hempel proposed the DN/IS model, several criticisms were brought up. It was claimed that there were some explanations that were not predictive (that DN/IS was not necessary), and that there were some theories that met the DN/IS conditions but that were not explanatory (that DN was not sufficient).

I have yet to find any potent instance either type of criticism.

Let's look at the sufficiency criticism first. One example is provided here:

Since smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years does not actually make it probable that a person will contract lung cancer, it follows from Hempel's theory that a statistical law about smoking will not be involved in an IS explanation of the occurrence of lung cancer.

This claim stems from Hempel's original IS constraint that the laws and boundary conditions of the model must predict the explanandum with high probability. Since my model doesn't require large variations in probability distributions, the criticism falls flat.

The second criticism is that of insufficiency. These arguments purport to show valid DN/IS explanations that are not truly explanatory because they have failed to capture the causality involved. Here's Wesley Salmon's classic:

C1. Butch takes birth control pills.
C2: Butch is a man.
L1: No man who takes birth control pills becomes pregnant.
____________________________________
E: Butch has not become pregnant.

The birth control example presumes that the person stating the problem has observed pregnancy in humans, but has not noticed (and thus does not know) that only women have ever been pregnant. He also notices that a particular man is taking birth control pills and the man has not become pregnant.

In my opinion, the explanation that the pills prevent him from becoming pregnant is a perfectly valid candidate for an explanation, but it's simply not the best (or the correct) explanation.

Salmon's example only appears to counter Hempel because we intuitively apply our background knowledge that men don't get pregnant. That's another law L2 that was not included in L1. If you assume L2, then L1 is superfluous. The point is that Hempel is perfectly correct if you assume the theorist doesn't know L2, and doesn't include L2 in his explanation.

Another set of arguments tries to show that symmetry of cause is a problem for Hempel. Normally, we would explain the length of a shadow cast by a flagpole in terms of the elevation of the Sun and the height of the flagpole. Suppose instead we try to explain the height of a flagpole in terms of the length of the shadow it casts and the elevation of the Sun. The formulas can be inverted and we can express the law fixing the height as a function of the other two variables.

Given our background knowledge that the shadow is the caused by the other two factors, we are intuitively aware that the inverted explanation is kooky, despite the fact that it meets the DN criteria. But what would happen if we didn't have that background knowledge?

The same thing will occur in any investigation in which the order of causality is ambiguous (does A cause B, or B cause A or do they have a common third cause?). If, in reality, we have yet to discover that A actually causes B, this unknown fact does not mean that the theory that B causes A does not qualify as a possible explanation for the observation. It simply means that the theory that B causes A is the wrong explanation, even though it is explanatory.

On what criteria do we distinguish A causing B from B causing A? There are several. The first is a time dependence such that A pre-exists before B or vice versa. In the case of the flagpole, we can detect that the photons travel in a time-dependent way from the Sun to the flagpole, establishing the shadow as the caused factor.

The second is that, if we detect a relation among three variables, A, B and C, and we learn that A is fixed, then we tend to reject A as being caused by the other factors. In the intuitively kooky explanation, once we find that the explanation always predicts the height of the flagpole to be a constant, we would prefer by convention to argue that the height is not the effect, but a cause. In the absence of seeing one factor pre-exist before the others, the more constant a factor, the earlier we prefer to place it in a causal chain.

So, again, what we have here is a failure to isolate the experiment from background knowledge. If we only ever saw the Sun at one elevation, the flagpole at one height, and the shadow at one length, we would not have enough information to divine an order of causality. In that scenario, the theorist will be quite justified in explaining any one factor in terms of the other two. He only prefers one explanation to the others once he makes a deeper (far deeper) investigation.

Prediction and Explanation: A Recapitulation

2006-11-16T18:51:00.000-08:00

The following is based on a comment I wrote at Thinking Christian.

Suppose we make a set of observations, O₁, O₂, O₃, ...O_n. Each observation could be physical or mental, i.e., they are experiences of any kind. We devise consistent theories, {T_i}, that claim to account for the {O_i}. There are trivial and non-explanatory theories among them. One says this:

T₁: You will observe O₁, O₂, O₃,... O_n.

This theory is trivial. If we observe some new O_j, we just amend the theory to:

T₁: You will observe O₁, O₂, O₃,... O_n and O_j.

Why can we do this? Because T₁ is never inconsistent with any observation O_j we might possibly make.

T₁ is not explanatory of the {O_i}, not by my definition, and presumably not by yours. If T₁ were explanatory, then every collection of observations or experiences would be trivially self-explanatory.

So, how do we resolve this minor problem? What is it about a theory that makes it explanatory?

One guess is that explanations serve to compress observations. A theory can have the effect of being a short-hand for many observations. For example, instead of maintaining a long list of the timed locations of a billiard ball in motion, we can propose that the location of the billiard ball is a fixed function of time and the ball's initial conditions. That is, we can propose that there are relatively fixed laws of billiard ball motion that substitute for a long list of data points. This is precisely my analogy with fitting curves to points on a graph. Fitting a curve is not a restatement of the data because the curve predicts interpolations and extrapolations. Note also that there is a difference between, say, noticing that the data points fall on a straight line and claiming that they fall on the line for a reason. The first is an observation, and the latter is a prediction.

So, I am claiming that an explanatory theory predicts a subset of {O_i} from part of the remainder of {O_i}. For example, suppose I make these observations:

O₁ = 1
O₂ = 4
O₃ = 9

My theory should predict O₃ given O₁ and/or O₂, or predict O₁ in terms of O₂ and/or O₃, etc. One theory that works here is

O_i = T(i) = i²

This not only predicts the already observed O₁-O₃, it also predicts O₄, and O₅ and O₀ and O_1.4 and so on. I can't think of any non-trivial theories that don't make predictions. Can you?

Suppose you observe the following:

O₂ = 4
O₄ = 16

What if we theorize that

O_i = T(i) = i², for i=2 and i=4 only.

This theory has been carefully tailored not to make a prediction. Is this explanatory? No, it's just like T₁. We've just done a trivial coordinate transformation on the data by expressing the {O_i} in terms of the square of a number instead of a direct value. It's a trivial restatement of the data. You might as well say that:

definition: T(i) = O_i

We're not explaining the observations, we're just saying that each succesive observation is given by a one-off rule that never applies to future observations. We would be drawing dots over your data points on your graph so as not to predict anything.

This is why an explanation never escapes making a prediction, for if it didn't, you could re-interpret the so-called explanation as a restatement of the data using a different coordinate system.

Remember, the {O_i} can be any form of experience, including a statistical measurement. This means that our predictions can be of a statistical nature, and that assertions of regularity needn't be large statistical effects. They could be assertions of very minor probability variations.

Sources of Knowledge

2006-11-12T20:44:00.000-08:00

In the course of a debate I've been having at Thinking Christian, a theist produced a link to Alvin Plantinga's critique of Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Here Dennett seems to assume that if you can't show by reason that a given proposed source of truth is in fact reliable, then it is improper to accept the deliverances of that source. This assumption goes back to the Lockean, Enlightenment claim that, while there could indeed be such a thing as divine revelation, it would be irrational to accept any belief as divinely revealed unless we could give a good argument from reason that it was. But again, why think a thing like that? Take other sources of knowledge: rational intuition, memory, and perception, for example. Can we show by the first two that the third is in fact reliable--that is, without relying in anyway on the deliverances of the third? No, we can't; nor can we show by the first and third that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is. Nor can we give a decent, non-question-begging rational argument that reason itself is indeed reliable. Does it follow that there is something irrational in trusting these alleged sources, in accepting their deliverances? Certainly not. So why insist that it is irrational to accept, say, the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit unless we can give a rationally conclusive argument for the conclusion that there is indeed such a thing, and that what it delivers is the truth? Why treat these alleged sources differently? Is there anything but arbitrariness in insisting that any alleged source of truth must justify itself at the bar of rational intuition, perception and memory? Perhaps God has given us several different sources of knowledge about the world, and none of them can be shown to be reliable using only the resources of the others.

My first observation was that Plantinga sees that reason relies on certain unprovable axioms, without all of which, no reasoned conclusion can be reached. This is a good start. Plantinga claims the axioms are logic, memory, and perception, but I suspect these equate to my axioms of logic, regularity, and the axiomatic nature of experience (that experiences need to be explained).

Plantinga then argues that, since we are comfortable accepting these axioms without proof, why not accept additional axioms (e.g., that there are non-rational sources of knowledge)? Maybe "Internal Testimony" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is just an extra-rational assumption, rather than an irrational one.

Alternate Sources of Knowledge
Assuming that knowledge is defined as justified true belief, what does rationality say about sources of knowledge?

If I have some source of knowledge, S, then I am saying that there is some associated test, T_S, I can apply to a proposition, P, to test its truth:

S: Truth(P) = T_S(P)

I am also saying that there is some (potentially different) form of justification for belief in P:

S: Justification(P) = J_S(P)

In the case of science, justification and test are one. The truth of a scientific belief is fixed by the test of its truth.

If I have multiple sources of knowledge, then I may have multiple definitions of the truth:

S1: Truth(P) = T_S1(P)
S1: Justification(P) = J_S1(P)

S2: Truth(P) = T_S2(P)
S2: Justification(P) = J_S2(P)

At this point, I'm going to assume that S1 is science and S2 is supernaturalism. This means I can write:

S1: Truth(P) = Justification(P) = T_S1(P)

S2: Truth(P) = T_S2(P)
S2: Justification(P) = J_S2(P)

There's no guarantee that a truth from one source of knowledge is a truth in the other. An intuitive personal truth (one tested by asking a person for his opinion) may not be a scientific truth. Thus, in general, the "truth" of a proposition has no fixed meaning when there is no preferred source of knowledge.

There are three ways to avoid the problem of propositions having no truth values:

1) Assume that there is only one source of knowledge. In this case, most of us would likely choose science.

2) Assume that there are multiple sources of knowledge, but that they should all agree on the truth of any applicable proposition. This means that:

T_S1(P) = T_S2(P)

3) Assume that no single proposition can be evaluated by every source. That no truth value revealed by S1 can be revealed by S2, and vice versa. This might be akin to Stephen Jay Gould's Non-overlapping Magisteria.

I'm pretty sure theists would reject (1). I won't entertain the claim that science is not the preferred source of knowledge where available because no one reading this blog could consistently make that claim.

This means that either (2) or (3) is the case.

Overlapping Magisteria
Case (2) is ruled out because supernatural knowledge sources are broadly inconsistent with scientific ones where they overlap. Psychics and miracles are routinely shown to be fraudulent, and supernatural sensation isn't any better than guessing. Thus, we have ample evidence that supernatural knowledge sources fail to give the same truth values as scientific methods, as would be expected in case (2).

Non-Overlapping Magisteria
Case (3) is problematic for the theist because it means that any question that can potentially be settled by predictive means cannot be answered by a supernatural source. Indeed, it means that any phenomenon that one claims to know through supernatural methods must be unknowable through natural methods. I think this is one reason why theists assert that the mind cannot be purely physical, for otherwise, there would be no meaningful truth claims about supernatural souls.

As is well known, history's trash heap is littered with supernatural beliefs that were displaced by scientific truths, and the boundary of the supernatural domain has been in monotonic retreat for centuries. Still, the inductive inference that all supernatural claims are rot isn't deductive proof that they are rot. So, let's suppose that there is a domain, non-overlapping with science, in which supernatural sensation does reveal the truth (at least, most of the time). It is implicit in a knowledge claim (supernatural or otherwise) that the knowledge will be true as well as justified. Can we not then ask science to assess the efficacy of the supernatural knowledge source?

Symbolically, what we're evaluating is this:

S1: Truth(S2 is effective) = T_S1(S2 is effective)

If it were possible for S1 to find S2 to be ineffective, then the space of truths of S2 would overlap (and potentially conflict) with those of S1 because S2 also implicitly asserts that it is effective. This would violate the premise that S1 and S2 don't overlap.

Therefore, S2 cannot give an answer that S1 might later determine to have been wrong. Thus, a fortune-teller cannot tell me that I'll be a millionaire by age 30 because I could use scientific means to know that he was wrong, and the fortune-teller implicitly claims he is right (i.e., he claims that his knowledge is not just supernaturally justified, but true). Unfortunately, this principle also negates all knowledge about future experience derived by S2 because such knowledge could be falsified by S1.

The practical upshot of all this is that S2 is unable to tell me anything about future experience. So why should I care what S2 has to say?

I might care about what S2 says if the execution of the method of S2 is a source of amusement. Is this why TV commercials for psychic hotlines display a "for entertainment only" disclaimer?

Science and Rationality
The beautiful thing about science (apart from the fact that it works) is that it is derived from rationality itself. In assuming that science is a source of knowledge, what am I assuming? I am assuming that I can make inductive inferences from past experience to predict future experience. Can I drop this assumption without destroying rationality itself?

If I assume that past experience is no guide to future experience, why should I assume that a theorem that I have just deductively proven true won't be false before I perform the next step in a proof? I cannot. I must assume that past experience, whether mental or physical, is a guide to future experience. Once I make this assumption for purposes of rationality, science automatically follows.

Conclusion
I have shown that supernatural sources of knowledge are either totally unreliable, or can only tell me about things that are irrelevant to experience. I have shown that science as a source of knowledge follows from the assumed axioms of rationality.

If science is accepted as the primary source of knowledge in any domain, it is the only relevant source knowledge about experience.

Nov 14 2006 Clarification: Science here refers to methods of deductive and inductive inference. It could be mathematics as easily as it is physics or linguistics.

Odds and Ends

2006-11-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

Newsweek has been publishing intelligent pieces on atheism recently. Today I saw this story on the Beyond Belief conference in La Jolla, California.

It's hard to be a skeptic, that much was clear from the conference. Hard for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who described trying to offer up thanks "to the scientists who made this abundance of food possible" at a friend's Thanksgiving dinner, only to be shouted down by demands for a proper grace. Hard for atheist author Sam Harris ("Letter to a Christian Nation") who likes to point out that people today believe in God based on no more evidence than the ancients had for believing in Zeus or Poseidon—with the result that in addition to all the mail he gets from Christians, he's now getting angry letters from pagans who claim he's insulted their beliefs, as well.

Man, I love these guys.

Newsweek also recently published a very short bit about Sam Harris for their BeliefWatch column.

And I love this:

Post Election Post

2006-11-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

Overall, the elections went well, even though there were several races I was very disappointed to lose.

We now have to use our victory to best advantage, and that means explaining to Americans just how horrible Bush and the Republicans have been for the last 6 years.

The American people don't like political games. Americans were passive in the face of Watergate. That was until the official wheels of justice began to turn, and serious crimes were found to have been committed. When this happens, the American people back prosecution. That's where House subpoena power comes in. I'm sure there's a lot of shredding taking place in Republican offices in Washington D.C. this week.

Many are uncomfortable at prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Miller for war crimes. I am not. I don't see why we ought to protect our own war criminals, while we chastise other nations for doing the same. Some will ask whether it is right that Bush et al be punished while Osama bin Laden goes free? Well, if Bush had caught Osama, this wouldn't be an obstacle, would it?

I think the Dems should tentatively plan to have the articles of impeachment lined-up for about 18 months from now. They don't need to dive in and start all the investigations on day one. Shameful revelations of Republican crimes occur about once a month, and it's not perceived as partisan to investigate them as the stories break. Eighteen months from now, thanks to new Republican scandals, we'll probably have a dozen House investigations in full swing, and an independent prosecutor.

By 2008, the bankruptcy of Republican authoritarianism will be plain to see, even to the average American voter.

Has America Lost Its Luck?

2006-11-04T20:16:00.000-08:00

There's a nice column by Michael Hirsh over at Newsweek:

What a glorious couple of centuries it has been, all held together by this great string of luck. "The Lord looks after drunks, children and the U.S.A." went the old saying, and it seemed true. But the thing about luck is that, eventually, you run out of it. Everybody craps out in the end. And that is what has happened to us. As Americans go to the polls Tuesday we must confront the fact that we have become a luckless people, all across the political spectrum.

...

But at a moment in history when we faced the most subtle sort of global threat, when we needed not just a willingness to use military force but a leader of real brilliance—someone who would carefully study a little-understood enemy—we got a man who actually took pride in his lack of studiousness. No surprise: Bush never once presided over a grand-strategy session to divine the nature of Al Qaeda, and he ended up lumping Saddam and every Islamist insurgent and terrorist group with Osama bin Laden. He ensured that a tiny fringe group that had been hounded into Afghanistan with no place left to go—one that could have been wiped out had we focused on the task at hand—would spread worldwide and become a generational Islamist threat.

Not that one could not have predicted what we're seeing now. Maybe the press couldn't believe the news they were supposed to report. They refused to call a dolt a dolt. Without the press bold enough to tell the truth, a lot of Americans went to the polls and elected an anti-intellectual simpleton. They elected a Forrest Gump to lead a nation composed largely of Forrest Gumps who think pure intentions are better than good intentions plus intelligence and expertise.

Hirsh is right, but he's six years too late.

Hoochification

2006-11-01T08:52:00.000-08:00

Is it wrong for a woman to dress in a sexually arousing manner lest it lead to objectification? This has been the topic of discussion (and, sometimes, non-discussion) over at Signs of the Times (here and here).

When I see a woman who displays her sexuality openly, I don't leap to the conclusion that she is a sex object and nothing else. For all I know, she might be a doctor, lawyer, history professor or CEO. Certainly, she is also a human person. To think otherwise would be for me to "objectify" her.

Of course, there is a minority of folks who will objectify her for her fashion choice. There are two reasons why one might think the existence of this minority ought to cause women to suppress their sexuality. First, one might think that the unpleasantness of being objectified by a fool outweighs the pleasantness of a sexual display. I don't think very many believe the scales tip this way. Most would argue that the woman runs her life, not the fools.

A second reason for women to suppress their sexuality in light of foolishness would be to avoid reinforcing the stereotype that a woman who dresses scantily is just an object through and through. If open sexuality were a reinforcer of the stereotype, it still wouldn't override a woman's right to live as she sees fit. After all, the problem with the stereotype is that it limits a woman's freedom, so supppressing that freedom is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The interesting thing that occurred to me during this debate is that public displays of sexuality ("hoochification") actually do work to overcome the objectifying stereotype. How will objectifiers learn that open sexuality is not mutually-exclusive of humanity without observing open sexuality in the presence of humanity?

[If S->~H, the falsifying pattern is (S ^ H). The theory cannot be falsified if S is never present.]

Indeed, dehoochification retards women's rights. I don't think the objectifying stereotype would vanish if we put women in burqas for 25 years. I suspect the reverse would result, and women who exposed their faces after 25 years of suppression would be seen as nothing but sluts (c.f., Iran).

I'm not saying that everyone ought to display their sexuality publicly and at all times. I'm just saying that there's nothing wrong with some people doing so some of the time.

Spaceballs

2006-10-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush goes on record as claiming space for the American empire.

This president is diplomatically retarded. Such a message plays well only to right-wing nut jobs. To everyone else in the world it looks arrogant and disrespectful. Why? Because the president doesn't need to broadcast this message. The U.S. just needs to be aware of national security threats, and take competent, subtle, persuasive or interdiction actions to defend against them. Do China and India make pronouncements like this? Of course they don't. Do we expect them to act as we would in their place? Sure we do. It's expected that every nation will take the steps it considers vital to its security interests. Blabbering about it on the world stage is counter-productive.

Teddy Roosevelt said America should speak softly and carry a big stick. Bush speaks loudly, and, if W has a stick, it's looking more and more impotent every day. Is Bush going to stop others from accessing space the same way he stops Iran and North Korea from getting nukes? That's what the world is thinking right now. America is an idiocracy.

The real national security threat is Bush himself. He doesn't promote competent people to positions of responsibility, he promotes sycophants to key government positions. He promotes people who will show loyalty to him, regardless of their competence for the job.

Speaking of incompetence, you may have heard that Rumsfeld has taken responsibility for the Iraq debacle. That's a little presumptuous, in my opinion. He's only responsible for about 80% of it. However, as a Republican, he's sure as Hell not going to be held accountable for what he's responsible for. Rumsfeld won't resign or change course. (What's that saying about doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results?) Osama bin Laden couldn't have asked for a better Secretary of Defense. Heckuva job, Rummy!

What Is Fundamentalism?

2006-10-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

According to my definition, a fundamentalist is someone who prefers to take knowledge from authority rather than from experience.

Creationists are the textbook case of fundamentalism. They'll spare no effort to discredit the science that falsifies literal biblical claims, but spend no effort justifying their belief in the authority of the Bible. If they were as skeptical of the Bible as they were of radiological dating, they would quickly denounce the Bible as a work of fiction.

Fundamentalism is not just another form of irrationality. It's irrationality with conviction. Fundamentalism has no corrective mechanism. How does the fundamentalist know that his authority is, well, authoritative? Apparently, not by experience. Without correction, we cannot claim commitment to the truth because we reject a priori any possibility that we could be wrong.

The Christian fundamentalist cannot complain that Osama bin Laden is using the wrong epistemology. bin Laden is using the very same epistemology as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Reason and experience are equally unimportant to all three of these clowns because each will carefully fold his experience to fit into his holy box.

The problem with every fundamentalism is that it results in unnecessary conflict. Instead of reaching consensus based on shared experience, the fundamentalist regards shared experience as either threatening or subservient to his unchangeable prior beliefs.

An Objective Morality

2006-10-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

I define a an objective claim as one whose truth does not depend on what persons think its truth ought to be. Previously, I wondered whether this definition precluded the possibility of an objective morality, but I've just realized that this isn't the case.

In physics, we correlate initial states with final states. Based on observations of the initial state, we predict attributes of the final state. Physics is objective because we can test physical laws independently of how we feel about those laws. We can even control our experiments by limiting the knowledge of the experimentalists performing the work. We can look at the radioactive decay rates of different isotopes, and it doesn't matter whether I think Carbon 14 ought to decay faster than Plutonium 238, it simply doesn't.

So, what would be the equivalent for moral objectivity?

Two different moral histories can result in the same physical intermediate state. If morality were objective, then observers could see the intermediate physical state evolve into different physical final states with different moral values.

For example, suppose we obtain two apparently identical tanks of heating oil. The tanks will be used to heat the ACME Corp warehouse. One tank is paid for by monies secretly stolen from the local orphanage. The other tank is paid for from the ACME coffers. If morality is objective, then we might expect that the two tanks of heating oil will have different caloric outputs. Maybe, the tank funded by ill-gotten money will generate less energy than the tank paid for out of the ACME bank account.

One can argue that the experiment won't work because we arranged to have the money stolen from the orphanage as part of the experiment. However, we can design other experiments that will bypass this problem.

Maybe stolen appliances will be more vulnerable to malfunction and failure than appliances purchased at a fair price. Or, what if guns and ammunition used by terrorists will be less effective, less accurate than weapons used by security forces? Does fair trade coffee always taste better than unfair trade coffee? Would medical knowledge obtained through cruel experimentation on humans work less effectively than the same knowledge obtained through ethical practices?

A priori, the world might have demonstrated such objective morality. In reality, this is simply not the case. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. Physics turns out to be independent of the moral history of the initial state. There is no universal justice as far as we can determine, and so morality is a property of our personal feelings, not a property of actions or things in and of themselves.

Christians will claim that everything gets balanced out in the hereafter, but this is just irrational. Claiming that universal justice exists is like claiming that cucumber sandwiches are conserved and that eating a cucumber sandwich on Earth results in the appearance of an identical sandwich on the other side of the galaxy. If we are to believe in objective morality, we ought also to believe in sandwich conservation laws, too.

I Knew There Had To Be A Technical Term For It

2006-10-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Reaction Formation.

Get Back To Me When You Have Some Answers

2006-10-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

Last night, I watched The God Who Wasn't There, and it had a greater effect on me than I anticipated.

I have long doubted that Jesus actually existed, so the claim that he didn't exist wasn't a big shock for me. News to me was the fact that Paul's letters, the only writings that bridge the 40-year gap between Jesus' supposed ascension and the appearance of the first Gospels, make no mention of any events of Jesus' life save for the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension. This fact just makes the New Testament that much more implausible. However, the thing that really got to me was the patent absurdity of the theistic position. Why am I spending so much time "lobbying for reality," as Ellen Johnson would say?

As I've written before, philosophical debate is a matter of validating consistency and comparing foundational assumptions. It's important to explore both one's own assumptions and reasoning, and those of one's opponent. One may find that both philosophies are consistent, but each side disagrees about their respective axioms. The problem that I am finding is that theists refuse to honestly assess their own axioms. What assumptions does the theist truly make in order to reach his conclusion? They themselves do not appear to know.

Instead of facing their assumptions head-on, the theists accuse me of begging the question, that is, of lining up my definitions and starting points so that my conclusion is inevitable. In retrospect, this is really quite flattering. If my assumptions lead inevitably to my conclusion, then they are merely verifying my logic. If they disagree, it is their duty as philosophers to challenge the assumptions and provide alternatives. This, unfortunately, is where they fail.

Why is this important? Because rational debate requires intersubjective claims. If you want to claim that the Moon is made of cheese, you're free to do that, but don't pretend you have rational reasons why I should believe you. Dispense with reason if you must, but I shall enjoy tar and feathering you when you do.

In the following, I shall present several definitions and axioms that I have used in argumentation. Theists will find each of them, at face value, eminently reasonable. At least, that is, until they realize that it annihilates supernatural belief. Being wedded to such beliefs, the theist must declare the definition or assumption invalid. That's fine. But get back to me when you have an alternative definition that you can live with.

Objectivity and Moral Destinations
I've been debating Christians and theists solidly for the last two years, and I've learned a lot about my position and theirs.

Overall, theistic arguments appear driven by a need to reach a particular moral position. Specifically, theists demand that we have free will and can be held accountable against an objective morality reality. From my perspective, theistic positions are derived from deep fears about the consequences of moral relativism. Not that it's bad to fear consequences of ideology. After all, I feel the same way about their position. The difference between us is that I fear a particular moral epistemology, and they fear humanity. I'll try to explain.

I have yet to see any moral phenomenon that cannot be explained by a morally relativistic system. Under moral relativism, we expect to see the same police and legal institutions that we see today. This isn't obvious, and I think it is the fear that moral relativism will somehow discount law and order that prevents the theist from looking at the question dispassionately. Theists prefer that there be an absolute, black-and-white definition of good and evil. They are compelled to seek out objective moral systems because they don't trust humans to act benevolently without them.

Of course, if morality is objective, then there can be legitimate moral authorities in the same way that there can be legitimate scientific authorities. For example, when the scientific community demonstrates that power transmission lines are radiation-safe, I have good cause to believe them. At any time, I can investigate the scientific process that led to this conclusion, and verify its integrity. The science could be wrong, but I can exercise due diligence in certifying its conclusions as the best available answer.

Not so for morality. Religious morality is some combination of the moral feelings of authoritarian humans combined with the "revealed" moral feelings of a supernatural authoritarian figure. There's no transparency, and epistemic due-diligence is actively discouraged by religious moral authorities. Now, a religious system of morality might turn out to be liked by many people. It might even be humanistic from time to time. However, if it's right, then it's not right because the methodology was right. If the authoritarian methodology is right, then why fault Osama bin Laden et al for their murderous morality? They have as much claim to authoritarian moral truth as anybody else.

How are men persuaded to accept authoritarian moralities? (I mean in discourse, as opposed to at the point of a gun or by familial brainwashing.) "Vote for Jesus because then there won't be murders!" To call this circularity hare-brained would be an insult to leporids. If murder being subjectively bad is justification for a position, then one is acknowledging the value of subjective sentiment in setting policy. There's no need to import a lot of other childish and irrelevant baggage with common sentiment. Sexual freedom isn't intrinsically bad, women aren't intrinsically unclean or inferior, and undetectable beings don't exist.

Again, in argumentation, the only justification for moral positions come from subjective moral feelings. So how can theists assert that morality is objective? By rejecting the common definition of the word objective:

A proposition is objective when its truth is independent of what I, the observer, think it ought to be.

Question-begging? If you like, Mr. Theist, but what's your alternative definition of objective, and what follows from your alternative?

Meaning and Precision
The old canard about logical positivism is that its verifiability theory of meaning failed to meet its own criterion. I have dealt with this subject numerous times before, so I'll just write up a short outline.

The meaning of a proposition, p, are those experiences that are implied and those experiences that are denied by p's truth. Further, any proposition that fails to imply both compatibilities and incompatibilities has no truth value at all.

It's really quite simple. The meaning of "2 + 2 = 4" relates to the experiences we will have that are consistent or inconsistent with the claim. Specifically, if we add two and two and get five, that experience is inconsistent with the claim. If you assert that a jaguar is in my garage, I had better find a Jaguar brand vehicle, an Anglo-French ground attack fighter, or a big old panther (or perhaps a representation of one of these) sitting in my garage. If I fail to find one of these, I ought to regard your proposition as false.

However, if you provide me with a proposition for which no experience can alter my confidence in its truth, then you haven't given me a meaningful proposition at all. It's literally about nothing. It's nonsense. Even you don't really know what it means.

Well, this all sounds pretty straightforward, so what is the metaphysician's objection? His objection is that this claim about meaning is not itself verifiable. There is no experience that ought to convince us that this is the one, true definition of meaning. Well, duh! It's a definition, and there are no true definitions, only conventional ones. The issue is whether the definition is meaningful by its own standards, and it most certainly is. When I declare that some roses are red is a meaningful proposition, I know what experiences are compatible with the claim. To wit, that I will experience a partial enumeration of experiences that are compatible (and a partial enumeration of experiences incompatible) with the claim that some roses are red. Likewise, when I claim that God is good is meaningless, I mean that the speaker denies that there should be any experience that is ever inconsistent with the claim.

Once these ideas are presented to the theist, what response do I get? Usually my opponent is called away at this stage. Pressing affairs of state or somesuch. Sometimes, I might get a complaint that this definition begs the question against the metaphysical. Again, I'm honored that my arguments have been found to be logically sound. The ball is in the theist's court. Will I hear a refutation in the form of a meaningful proposition for which no consequence is implied? Nope. Do I hear an alternative definition of meaning that admits metaphysical claims? Nope. I think I hear crickets.

I Demand an Explanation!
Anyone who has visited my blog with any regularity (thanks to the both of you, BTW!) understands where I'm coming from.

An explanation is a set of facts and rules that preferentially predicts the observation that's being explained (the explicandum). That is, every explanation relies on some predictive law under which the prior conditions must (or preferentially) lead to what is actually observed.

Who named me the king of definitions, you might ask? Well, it's not just my definition, actually. Essentially, this is the definition of Hempel & Oppenheim.

"Begging the question!" shout the theists. "Of course God isn't explanatory by that definition of an explanation. No, there must be another definition that allows God to be explanatory!"

Yeah, well put up or end this pretense that theism is a rational enterprise. Under what definition of explanation is God explanatory? And, no, it cannot simply be an intuition. Intuition is not rational, not intersubjective and often wrong.

Conclusion
I'm not demanding that my opponents accept my definitions and my assumptions. Axioms cannot be proven. However, I like to think that my axioms do not extend beyond the bare minimum necessary for rational thought. These include logical consistency, that there exist discoverable laws, and that memory of experience is somewhat trustworthy.

[To clarify: I don't claim that every theory about our experiences should be trustworthy, only that we did actually have most of the experiences we think we did. A person's theory that Bigfoot trampled their peyote patch may not be true, but their vision of Bigfoot doing the mambo in their garden was actually experienced by them.]

What do I ask? I ask that my opponents make their definitions explicit. I ask that they honestly consider whether or not they can rationally live with their assumptions. If they accept such axioms, do they not open the door to beliefs that they find absurd or contradictory? If morality is objective, what isn't objective? If meaning has no fixed definition, is it impossible to mistake nonsense for meaningful content? How much pride should we feel in asserting an explanation that doesn't predict what's being explained? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Reliability of Rationality Argument

2006-10-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

For some reason, philosopher/theologian Alvin Plantinga is famous for his defenses of theism.

One argument that I've encountered once or twice is Plantinga's argument against naturalism. It argues that we should expect a low probability that evolution gave us reliable faculties for rational thought. The technical details of his argument have been well-refuted.

The first problem is that, frankly, human rationality isn't particularly reliable (as Plantinga himself demonstrates). However, any evolutionary process that creates thinking creatures is bound to create them with at least some rational capability. Without such capability, knowledge would be impossible, and the thinking process would have no advantage. In other words, it is all but certain that evolution would provide us with at least partial rationality.

Humans are capable of intuiting a distinction between the rational and irrational, and this provides a base from which they can amplify their rationality. This is much in the same way that humans find it difficult (non-intuitive) to do advanced mathematics, but they can succeed in this process through writing, symbolic manipulation and repetition. Thus, even having some rationality provides the necessary basis for high-reliability rationality.

The second problem is that Plantinga is claiming that we are more likely to be rational if theism is correct. This is rubbish. Introducing God removes any causal link between us and the deity that created us. Simply put, God isn't explanatory of our rationality because theism doesn't predict our rationality. As usual, theists can tune their theology so that we see what we see (e.g., humans are rational and fish aren't), but they never ever get any actual predictions, and their fine-tuned God accounts for exactly what we know to date, and never one thing more.

Responsibility Without Accountability

2006-10-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Hastert is playing the standard Republican game. Once found guilty of gross (even criminal) negligence, a Republican politician will make a public announcement accepting responsibility for his or her misdeed. However, the GOP pol will be very careful to avoid being held accountable for his actions. Responsibility without accountability. It's the new Republican motto.

Contrast

2006-09-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

I just watched a PBS documentary about Apollo 8. At the conclusion of the 1968 mission, American flags were given out in celebration. A moment of true pride in what America could do, not just for itself, but for the world.

Today, the U.S. Congress voted to allow the President to define torture, to deny suspects any recourse if they are tortured beyond his definitions, and to deny suspects the right of habeus corpus.

The leader of the ignoble Americans who voted for this legislation accused the opposition of "supporting rights for terrorists." His implication being that any man, woman or child detained by the United States on terrorism charges is guilty. There are no "terrorist suspects" in his eyes. It simply remains for us to extract confessions from those we have imprisoned.

No American flags were handed out today.

Metapolitics Go-meme

2006-09-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

This is a political map invented by Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera. I've tried to plot my positions on the scales, but I'm not quite convinced that the scales have unambiguous meanings.

a) Liberalism - X - - - - - Radicalism (2/7)
Do the ends justify the means? Procedural liberals insist on the primacy of fair play and democratic process. Radicals care less about method, and more about getting the desired result.

b) Rationalism - - - X - - - Subjectivism (4/7)
Is there ever a "right answer" to political questions? Rationalists think that reasoned debate could, ideally, lead to consensus about the common good. Subjectivists see politics as a mere contest of wills, all rhetoric and power plays, where the goal is simply to have your individual preferences win through.

c) Direct - - - X - - - Representative Democracy (4/7)
Should power rest more with citizens or elected representatives?

d) Aggregation - - - - - X - Deliberation (6/7)
Should political decisions be reached by simply aggregating individuals' prior preferences, or by submitting reasons for deliberation and critical scrutiny?

e) Federalist - - - X - - - Globalist (4/7)
What's the most appropriate level for political decisions? Federalists favor local-level decision-making (which may vary across localities), in contrast to Globalists.

f) Libertarian - - - X - - - Authoritarian (4/7)
How much discretionary power should be allowed in politics? Libertarians favor greater (e.g. constitutional) constraints on the exercise of political power. Authoritarians (may include populists and paternalists) are the opposite.

g) Economic Left - X - - - - - Right (2/7)
How favorably do you view redistributive taxation and other typically "Left-wing" economic policies?

I find the problem with these surveys is that it's difficult to define the appropriate scope or time horizon for the question. For example, is scale (d) asking whether people should think about political decisions before voting on them? Is it asking whether they ought to prove that they have thought about them before they can vote? Is it asking whether it is presently practical to do so? Indeed, scales (c) and (d) seem closely related. We might feel better about direct democracy if voters were actually going to consider the issues in detail. Scale (b) is also related to (c) and (d), since reasoned debate is only going to achieve consensus if the voters are paying attention to the details (which they don't).

Maybe it would be better to grade how a person feels about individual involvement in the political process. Should (or can) individual citizens maintain enough interest and understanding of political issues to make informed decisions? If not, what mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that the system isn't radicalized by special interest groups?

Miracles (or how not to communicate with rational mortals)

2006-09-24T05:45:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, there was a post over at Thinking Christian about the historical accuracy of the Resurrection of Jesus. This got me thinking about the inferences involved in reaching the conclusion that the Resurrection probably happened.

Intuitively, the Resurrection is significant because it is a very unusual event. We have never observed any other resurrections, so scientifically, we can estimate the odds at being around 1 in 10 billion. Or perhaps it's less likely still.

It is this improbability which has to be compared with alternative improbabilities in assessing whether we should infer that the Resurrection happened. For example, would someone write a story saying that it happened if it never occurred? Would the story have been embarrassing to the early church that promulgated it? Well, suppose that we assign a mere 1% chance that the story was fabricated, and another 1% chance that the church would have told a story that was embarrassing. Let's throw in another 1% improbability factor, just for fun. That brings us to 1 in a million odds that the story would have been written if it weren't true.

No help there. The story only becomes plausible when we reach 1 in 10 billion odds. After canceling factors, there's still only a 1 in 10,000 chance that the story is true. A rational person must conclude that the event probably didn't happen.

This isn't proof that the Resurrection didn't occur. It may have. It's simply not rational to conclude that it did.

If you're a god, what is the point of demonstrating your power in an unambiguous way to just a few people, when the rest of the world would be irrational to conclude that the witnesses were telling the truth?

What we have discovered here is a trap set by our intuitions. We intuitively think that miracles (highly improbable one-time events) are an appropriate way for a god to verify his status as deity. This intuition is flawed because it only works if the believer fails to be rational. Instead, the god should demonstrate his power in repeatable, scientifically testable ways, so that rational people will have reason to conclude he is at least god-like in capability.

Inside the Morality Room

2006-09-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

Suppose I design a Morality Room to test your feelings about the morality of certain actions. In the room, I screen a movie showing an act, the consequences of that act, and the consequences of not acting. You then press the "Good" or "Evil" button to indicate whether you feel the act was good or evil.

So, when I show you a movie of your foiling a handbag-snatching attempt, and this leading to the thief's immediate arrest (instead of his striking again), you press the "Good" button.

[We can imagine variations on this theme, with movies showing multiple actions and scoring them each relative to one another. For now, the simple version will suffice.]

The Morality Room is a useful tool for illustrating how we can be confused when we consider counterfactuals.

The classic one is "how would you feel if you were aborted and never existed?" The movie shows you the alternatives, namely life as you know it, then life without you. By now, you have probably noticed the problem. You cannot objectively answer whether your non-existence was good, when you are the one existing to provide the answer. Your answer presumes your existence.

Another question is "would it be okay if you were murdered, assuming that you did not suffer, and the memories of others were erased to ensure you did not suffer?" Or, equivalently, "would it be okay if you ceased to exist if no one suffered directly on account of your non-existence?"

Again, this question cannot be answered by the room. You, the judge, will suffer when you see the movie, so you must answer that the act is evil.

What can we take from this? Well, I'm not saying that we ought not think that "disappearing" people, even painlessly, is not evil. It feels pretty evil to me. Instead, what we learn is that we cannot rationally reach the conclusion that an act is objectively good or evil when we are hypothetically indifferent to the act. We cannot objectively say that murder is wrong even when it happens to someone we don't know, when there is no suffering, and when we are unconscious of the event. It's too late, because we are already in the room and we've seen the movie. We can't be unconscious of the event and still answer the question.

This isn't to say that subjective morality isn't perfectly adequate. It is.

P.S. I can't have been the first person to think of this thought experiment. Anyone know of a reference to something more original?

Why We're Losing The War

2006-09-11T21:26:00.000-07:00

The short answer is that ideology is trumping strategy.

Strategically, we need to look at the big picture. People fall into three categories: those who are sympathetic to us, those who fear us, and those who are hard core terrorists.

The sympathetic demographic is relatively unimportant.

The hard core terrorists are a tiny minority. They number in the thousands, and nothing we say or do will deter them from their mindless, murderous, faith-based initiative. The only way to deal with these people is to apprehend them or kill them in the process.

The demographic with the highest importance is the fearful one. There are at least a billion or more people who are unsympathetic to the United States because they fear American military intervention, and the abuse of American economic and political power. They may not like the terrorists, but they may see the terrorists as a reaction to a real threat, or as a counterbalance to American hegemony. The war in Iraq demonstrated to them that the US respected no one, and was willing to break all the rules in order to satiate its thirst for control.

This group, the fearful, is the real group we need to target. Not with bombs, but with candy and flowers, and with human rights and cultural respect. For every one-in-a-million of these US-fearing people we turn to terror, we create another thousand hard-core terrorists. If we fail to win hearts and minds among this demographic, we will LOSE!

Why does this fact elude the Bush administration? Bush has answered the question himself. He believes that this is an ideological war, and not a psychological one. For Bush, it's about looking and acting tough. About giving no quarter to active terrorists. He doesn't understand that direct counter-terrorism is a side-show that should play a lesser role in the public consciousness. This is why we're playing our cards so poorly that the fearful demographic has produced more terrorists than we have neutralized.

We cannot win when we cannot see the battlefield, and refuse to use effective weaponry. The only reason things aren't worse is that the other side isn't much better at this game than we are.

Update: Just 3 hours after I wrote this, If found this article at MSNBC:

Five years after 9/11, Arab resentment grows

"Even mainstream Arab professionals, like Jamil M'roue, who publishes and edits Beirut's English-language newspaper, the Daily Star, finds himself caught up in the contradiction of both being appalled by the terror of 9/11 and of applauding al-Qaida when, as he puts it, it gets to the “rabid tiger” that America has become."

Kicking and Screaming

2006-09-07T06:32:00.000-07:00

There's a disturbing trend across the Christian blogosphere. Creative interpretation of the history of science. Let's get this straight. Religion is the enemy of science, and it always has been. Science prospered in spite of religious efforts to suppress it.

Here's how the story goes:

1) Religionist cooks up non-predictive fairy tale about some natural phenomenon, e.g., lightning strikes. His prescription: do what he says, or, what he says God says. If you get struck by lightning, you deserved it.

2) Scientist comes up with new, predictive, scientific explanation of lightning. His prescription: find shelter, build lightning conductors, etc.

3) Religionist assaults scientist for stealing God's thunder (or lightning, or mojo, or whatever).

4) Assuming scientist survives, his theory is vindicated, lives are saved, there is much rejoicing, etc.

5) After the original stick-in-the-mud religionists expire, the religious establishment embraces the scientific theory as a miracle of God, or as having been forecast by a holy book. Or, they simply claim that all regularity and predictability are gifts from God.

Is religion the power behind science? Of course it isn't. Religion is a parasite that feeds on science.

The thing that's changing today is that history is being more aggressively rewritten by religionists. Some bloggers have told me that Galileo wasn't imprisoned by the church for his ideas about heliocentrism, but because he published his ideas with inadequate experimental rigor. Say what!?! As if this would be okay now that science is God and all. This is just ridiculous. Galileo challenged the Pope's grip on totalitarian power, usurped supernaturalism, and challenged the church's worldview. They locked him up and threatened to kill him. It's that simple.

The same story is played out over and over again. Seeing human physiology as machine, human mind as mechanism, the universe as physics - all these things challenge the role of God and ethereal spirits. Each was challenged as offensive to religious belief, vindicated, then hailed as a contribution of theology.

Religion was responsible for scientific advance in the same way that the Third Reich was responsible for the modern state of Israel. The influence of the church on science is undeniable, but it's not a causative relationship. Religion was dragged kicking and screaming into a scientific world. And it's still kicking and screaming.

Experiences are Axiomatic

2006-09-06T08:57:00.000-07:00

There are certain assumptions that are implicit in rational thought. Logical consistency and predictability are two such assumptions. In my past analyses, I have been neglecting another assumption: the assumed truth of observation and experience.

Dreams, imaginations, memories, and illusions may be misleading, but the fact that I have them is always assumed true. The pink flying elephant may not exist outside my imagination, but my daydream of it was real.

If I try to multiply two numbers together, I cannot trust that I will get the right answer unless I also trust that I'm accurately remembering (or experiencing) the two factors. This is analogous to trust in predictability because it is predictability that assures me that the rules of arithmetic haven't changed since the last time I multiplied two numbers together.

In several of my recent posts, I have been commenting on the link between subjective value and truth. I outlined a description of truth wherein we build axiomatic systems from which follow contingent, objective truths, but the axioms that form the foundations of those systems are selected for subjective reasons. This certainly feels true in mathematics, where we are studying the theorems contingent on sets of axioms. The theorems of both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are true contingently upon acceptance of their respective axioms, yet we often have no preference for truths in either system.

What I have been seeking is a reason why the axioms of science should be preferred over alternatives, and, with this last assumption in place, I have found it. The assumptions of science are that the world is logical, that it is predictable, and that observations are axiomatic - precisely the axioms of rational thought. A scientific theory is an axiomatic model that incorporates the axioms of past experience. The predictions of the theory are those experiential axioms that can be added to the system without contradiction.

This highlights the problem with supernaturalism. If, in the course of an inquiry, we give up on any of the three axioms (most supernaturalists prefer to sacrifice predictability), then we exclude the possibility of a rational understanding. The word "supernatural" is synonymous with "inexplicable."

Gene Therapy

2006-09-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

The National Cancer Institute has demonstrated a cancer-fighting technique based on gene therapy. The study involved only 17 patients, but it sounds highly significant. Each patient gave up immune cells that were genetically modified to fight their cancer. The immune cells were then multiplied and injected back into the patient. Two patients who were expected to live only 3-6 months were cured.